The Eleventh Plague

When Moses, under God's direction, pleaded with Pharoah to free the Israelites, Pharoah refused. Each time God sent a plague. There were locusts and bad water and even the death of all the first-born male children. That was the tenth plague. It was the one that finally brought Pharoah's capitulation.

What is not recorded in the bible is that God still held an eleventh plague in reserve. If all the first ten plagues could not convince Pharoah, God would have sent the eleventh plague which surely would.

The eleventh plague is conservatism/fascism. Nothing can destroy a country more than conservatism. Conservatism comes from a closed heart and a closed hand. A closed heart is one that is dead or dying. A closed hand is a fist.

It is like that today. We are experiencing the eleventh plague in the United States.

When I was growing up, during World War II, we all knew that we would have to temporarily give up some amenities. There would not be as much milk as we wanted. Sugar was in short supply. Gasoline was rationed. My mother, a three-pack a day smoker, had to roll her own cigarettes. But despite all that, the outlook was bright. We would win the war and then see a better day.

And all through the post-war era and the 1950s and 1960s and even the inflationary period of the 1970s, things were getting better. Polio was conquered. The US was crisscrossed by new highways and bridges that helped expand commerce. The average working person could make enough money to raise a family and send his kids to college.

Much of this came about because of the rise of labor unions. The union movement brought us a five-day work week, decent pensions for retirement, health care, labor laws that prevented the abuse of 10 year old children in factories and much more.

Then came the so-called Moral Majority, in actuality neither a majority nor moral. Funded by wealthy contributors, just as now, they elected as president, Ronald Reagan, a man who began by destroying unions, continued by destroying pensions and putting this country into tremendous debt. They still continue by destroying the public education system that brought prosperity and innovation.

(The only administration which has not added to the debt was that of Bill Clinton. The current one has added to the debt by continuing the unfunded wars begun by the conservative Republican administration before it, as it struggles to reverse all these trends.)

Now, by it's intransigence, the conservatives both Rethuglican and DemoRats continue to be a plague on this country. The more extreme ones deny the reality of global climate change despite the clear evidence. They have declared war on women, on minorities, on the poor.

The California university system provided free tuition to Californians for many years. That brought a tremendous outpouring of technological creativity. Silicon Valley is almost synonymous with the computer revolution and is a direct result. But the conservatives, beginning with the aforementioned Ronald Reagan have starved the system so that tuition is now at outrageously high rates. The result is a loss of competitiveness in the world economy.

Similar results have obtained in mental health efforts, physical health maintenance, the prison system and even fire-fighting and law enforcement. The roads and bridges of the U.S. are deteriorating as is the electric grid and most other parts of the "commons"

The only reasonable conclusion is that God has brought this plague of conservatism, the modern form of corporatocracy to this country because we allow the wealthy to dominate the political system.

Look it up. It is very biblical. (Isaiah, Micah, Amos and other prophets.)