Thank you Mama!

Socialism--it keeps coming up and people keep acting like it's a dirty word or something. You could start a great big fight right there on Twitter among supposed liberal allies just trying to define what it is. Most people agree it's how we've always lived; that having government services like the post office and public schools is a degree of socialism. Throw in some roads, bridges, parks, libraries, and public servants to create a basis from which restrained/regulated capitalism can flourish and you start to get what I think of when I think about socialism.

Then you have you're ideological purists at the other end of the spectrum who refuse to call it socialism as long as every industry isn't state-owned and state-run! Whatever! Does anybody really want to live in that world? I can't imagine it would be a satisfying existence for anyone.

I consider myself a socialist. My mother was a socialist, and my grandmother was a socialist. And I dare say that that is true of just about every matriarch of every family of everyone I know! Were the women in my family really so political that I would project that every mom in America is a socialist? Well no, they weren't political at all as far as I'm aware. (I suppose the dads of the world might have been doing similar things as the women in my world, but I just don't have firsthand knowledge of that. I mostly saw women at work and learned from them.)  But what they did in raising their families, how they taught us as children to treat each other at home and others in the greater world, smacked of socialism just as obviously as your nose protrudes from your face!

When we sat down to the dinner table to eat we all got the same food, and everyone got a fair share before anyone took extra. Every member of the family was expected to contribute to getting the chores done according to their ability.  Being an older child in a large family I did a lot of taking care of other children.  Sometimes I did get "more" for that reason, but I didn't always get more.  Most importantly, none got extra until everyone had enough!  And when we needed things like shoes, clothes, books, ice cream, and medical and dental care, whatever it was that we needed, we all got pretty much what we needed. We didn't get the same things--we each got what we needed! There was no difference in the quality of the food, clothing, and education provided for us and, all in all, it was a pretty fair system.

I don't think I need to explain where this is going. If a family was run on a plan anything like the unfettered capitalism the "big money" interests want then who would survive childhood. Why does it seem right that we emerge from the fold of the family to be thrown to the wolves in a "survival of the fittest" world? Do we suddenly cease to be human beings? Do we no longer deserve to exist in the kind of person-centered world our nurturers taught us to navigate? Socialism is a natural tendency of human beings. It's how we interact with family and friends. We live in a land of plenty. We don't need to struggle to feed people. We just need to get control of the greedy people. Hoarding wealth, just like hoarding cats, is a mental illness. We need to call people out for it, and get them some help. We need to establish a government of the people, by the people, and for all the people. How did we screw that up? A discussion for later!