Note: I often go on little rants on Twitter when the mood strikes instead of writing things here. As such, I’ve decided to go back and pull the threads and change them into blog posts, if only so this blog doesn’t sit completely fallow between times when I decide to post things. Plus, it will allow me to finish some thoughts that might not have been complete due to character limits on Twitter. Check out the tag “Twitter Rants” for all the posts like this. They will be posted on the date that I initially did the thread.
Mike Lee (R), Junior Senator from Utah, my home state and current place of residence, looks like he’s going to be busy:
“What We Do Together” – A summary of my recently-launched Social Capital Project: https://t.co/untDzmx2A5 @forbesopinion
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) May 16, 2017
This tweet prompted the following thread on Twitter:
1) I know you have staffers doing this, but the optics of this right now… wow… Maybe Americans are facing “challenges” in this “new era” https://t.co/TQ7NmX8PBy
— Robert Eberhard (@GuruEbby) May 16, 2017
You can read it there, but I’m going to expand on some of the things I said below in a format that might be a little easier to read:
I know he most likely has his staffers doing this, but the optics of this right now… wow…
Maybe Americans are facing “challenges” in this “new era” because of rampant partisanship, primarily by the party in power, like the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on a SCOTUS nominee or the refusal to investigate and hold the POTUS accountable for his daily BS. You can blame it on “polarized ‘solutions'” all you want, but you and your party’s agenda are partly responsible for those “solutions” because of your refusal to bend an inch at any time.
“Party Over Country” should be the new mantra of the modern Republican Party. Instead, you blame “church attendance” or “single parent homes” as the reason for a decline in our political norms, repeating conservative talking points that further alienate people that don’t support the way that you think. You do realize that you might have non-religious supporters, no? Or that lack of church attendance doesn’t automatically mean that a person is amoral? That’s what you implied in your little commentary.
There are plenty of people, Christian and non, that find organized religion (aka “attending church”) to be an institution that is in the past. The numbers you cite bear this out. People as a species change. It used to be that 100% of us lived in caves; now that number – while not zero – is a much smaller representation of people. That shouldn’t be an indictment about people that don’t want to live in caves anymore.
You also marginalize people that spend “too little time with their children.” Wonder why these people aren’t spending time more time at home? Could it be because they have to work multiple jobs because you and your party refuse to require employers to provide employees with a living wage? With affordable healthcare? If I wasn’t secure in my job, if there was a chance my kiddo wasn’t going to be able to eat or go to the doctor, you better believe I’d make the sacrifice of working more, even at the “cost” of seeing him less. People need to do certain things to survive.
You and your party’s continued attack on the hardworking people of this country is appalling! No wonder people have less trust in their government. Instead of trying to improve our lives, you and your party continue to put the needs of the very few (top 5%) of the country ahead of people that really need it. And then you vilify these same people that you aren’t helping for not being as happy and go lucky as they were decades ago, back in the halcyon days when it was legal to segregate our schools and deny people the right to choose.
You hate government regulation, yet think it’s okay to remove the regulations that keep people healthier (clean water and air) because your corporate donors want to destroy our planet. You state life-expectancy is at an all-time high, but our infant mortality rate is much lower than it should be. What do a lot of the countries above us on that list have in common? They care about their citizens, especially pregnant ones. Yet you and your party demonize Planned Parenthood for providing many of the prenatal services that other countries take for granted.
Educational attainment is high, primarily because of sky high student loan debt for a generation of Americans. Yet this administration, instead of easing this burden, has decided to placate student loan lenders on the backs of these students. If you think our economy is okay, just wait until millions of Americans suddenly can’t pay their student loans; it will rival the Great Recession, and be felt by a larger swath of the prime working population.
So, yeah, let’s not investigate Trump to find out why people aren’t going to church anymore. Let’s continue to harangue the less fortunate because they weren’t as lucky enough to be born a white male in a society that still thinks that that means something. Poor people are the worst, am I right Senator Lee?!? How dare they work a lot in order to feed their family! How dare they stop visiting an institution once a week that has done more harm in the world than not!
I just wonder how hard it was for you to not end this drivel with Trump’s campaign slogan. You are part of the problem, not the solution! This “Social Capital Project” is something you can do to show you are “working hard in Washington.” But it doesn’t directly help anyone. You probably don’t really care because you are safe in your position until 2022, though sometimes it feels like you think you were elected in 1962.
It only takes one person to stand up to the White House, to put country over party. But it’s nice to see where you place your priorities.
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