Month: September 2004

If this blog suddenly seems to have taken an ugly turn towards politics leaving my much beloved poetry behind, I’d guess it’s because of them:

I spent the long weekend with my children and grandchildren, which kept me both busy and entertained.

Much of what I do now, at least politically, is done for them not me. With more than enough to live on, my concern has shifted to my children, and particularly my grandchildren.

I didn’t spend my life working as a caseworker and teacher to suddenly abandon the next generation because I’ve retired.

I continue to be amazed at how the internet can provide some of the background information needed to make sense of an insane world while the mainline media continues to ignore historical facts, instead prefering to focus on the sensational, emotional aspects of the news to sell their product.

I was originally motivated to provide the following links because of a vistor, one I presume to be a conservative Republican, who has twice commented on a much earlier entry entitled “This Ain’t No Stinking War Blog,” his point apparently being that protestors shouldn’t have been picketing the Republican Convention because nobody was out protesting the killing of hundreds of children and parents in Chechnya.

Well, first of all, Mark, there’s not much use protesting unless you think there’s some hope that someone in higher power (in the convention’s case, that would probably be the American voters) might actually act and change the current situation. Demonstrators could probably be accused of being naive enough to believe that a majority of people would act differently if they saw the world the same way the protestors did, but I’m sure that was the main reason for their largely peaceful protests.

If they were Republicans, of course, the protestors would have put more faith in the power of the dollar and depended on 30-second commercials to sway the American public to vote for the way they wanted them to vote. After all, it’s worked so far for the Republicans. No wonder they’re so outraged that the Democrats and their allies seem suddenly to have nearly as much money to spend on commercials as they do.

Unfortunately, it seems extremely doubtful that terrorists who would go so far as to kill innocent children are likely to be swayed by demonstrations. If so, I’d be one of the first ones out there demonstrating, as would most of my liberal friends, I’m sure.

If there is any hope in ever resolving the problem, though, one suspects that we need to begin by examining the roots of the problem and see how we can begin to destroy this cancerous growth before it destroys us. It’s hard to see how you can hope to solve a problem if you do not understand the causes for it, though.

Personally, my search led me to What is Going on In Chechnya? which in turn let me to the Dhekr of the Chechens For me at least, these articles help to fill in some much-needed background on a part of the world I am woefully uninformed about.

My greatest fear is that it is precisely terrorist attacks like this that we may face in the future if we continue to allow our foreign policy to be driven by greed and ignorance. Until we know and address the causes of such violence, it’s unlikely that anything short of genocide will end the problem. And while genocide may have worked in ancient times, it seems unlikely it will do so in the modern world where our actions are constantly monitored by the world’s media.

Personally, I doubt most Americans are willing to live in a world where we attain some kind of illusory “safety” by killing millions of Muslims throughout the world.

Inspired by a Seattle Times article entitled “Gap between rich and poor widening in troubled economy” I started to write a brilliant attack on the Bush Administration’s tax policies, which in my mind seemed to invariably favor the rich.

Before beginning, though, I decided I needed to clarify some terms, beginning with the term “middle class,” which is a term both parties seem to use rather loosely, perhaps not too surprising when you realize how many people claim that they are “middle class” or aspire to be “middle class.”

After searching the web for a definition, I ended up here, which seemed to offer the most comprehensive definition of this, at best, rather nebulous term.

It seemed to me that the technical definition offered, that the middle class is that part of the population that lies between the bottom 20% and the top 20%, is rather meaningless. Does that mean that in an impoverished third-world nation that someone who makes a $1000 a year is middle class? Using this definition, it’s impossible to argue that the middle class is disappearing because by definition there will always be a middle class, no matter how impoverished the nation might be.

Personally, though, I was more upset by some of the ramificaitions of that definition. Here’s one way of using those guidelines to define “middle class” from the article referenced above:

Another way to determine the economic middle class is to take the median household income of $40,800 and define as middle class those households that are between 80% and 120% of the median…that is households between $33,000 and $49,000.

According to that definition, I wouldn’t be middle class at all. I’d be part of the upper class, by a rather considerable margin.

Another application of that definition seems even more suspect in my mind:

… using U.S. census data from 1999, the middle class is those families whose incomes are more than $17,000 and less than $76,000.

I’m extremely doubtful that $17,000 would allow a family to live what I would call a middle class lifestyle. Here in the Pacific Northwest, at least west of the mountains where I live, at least half of that income would go for housing. Half of what’s left would have to go for food, and most of what’s left would go for car payments and gas money. They certainly couldn’t afford family health insurance or money for education. I doubtthey could even afford to outfit kids for school, except by going to charitable organizations.

This definition would, depending on the year, again put me in the upper class. It would certainly put most of my friends with two working family members in the upper class, which, again, seems like a questionable categorization to me.

Issues like this make me wish I’d taken more classes in economics or, even, read more widely in the field. I do know that I’ll be thinking a lot more on what the term “middle class” really means to me and why I’m so convinced that protecting what I call the “middle class” is essential to the long-term welfare of our nation.