Last edited Sun Aug 13, 2023, 07:45 AM - Edit history (2)
I am NOT an elite person. At age 30, after many years of struggle, I finally got a master's degree in speech pathology & audiology, so I could be a traveling speech therapist in rural Illinois schools. I have NEVER been rich. I lived in slums and went hungry a lot in childhood. My mother had lived in slums and gone hungry a lot in her childhood, starting in the two Great Depression crashes. And yes, there WERE two crashes; my mother's family was starting to be okay when the second one threw them out on the street and into starvation again. My mother very slowly worked and studied her way up from dime store clerk to stenographer to secretary, and then to legal secretary around the time I reached high school. She took us to the library a lot, she read good books to us a lot, and she spent her off hours writing poetry and reading history and philosophy. I went to college on a small part-scholarship, and I worked at the Chicago Public Library several years to save money to go back to school, and I went hungry half the time I was earning my degrees and sometimes even after that. I am NOT an elite person. I am also not a Republican. My family used to be Republicans, starting when the Republicans were the party of the Abolitionists. President Johnson worried that his reforms would cause some Democrats to become Republicans; it had the opposite effect in my family. I will never forget the bewildered look on my mother's face, the last big election of her life, as she said, "I guess I am voting for all Democrats this time!" The Republican party has changed. It is like one of those caterpillars who get wasp eggs laid in them; the wasp eggs hatch and the larvae grow inside, slowly eating the caterpillar inside out. Fascists have infested the Republican party. They have used some of the vast fortunes of the wealthy right-wingers to mount huge propaganda campaigns all over our country. They have convinced some of the poor people that they are suffering because the Black people are taking all the money in welfare checks. I always knew this was a lie, because every time I go out, I see Black people working all over the place, just as much as I see white people working all over the place. Also, I was paying attention when Bill Clinton reformed the welfare system, many years ago. We need to strengthen our resolve and work harder to get the real facts out there. Hillary Clinton was right about that vast right-wing conspiracy.
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