Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel & Iraq: America's Favorite
Money Pits
08 August 2010By Jane Stillwater
Yesterday my two-year-old granddaughter Mena and I
were completely at logger-heads. She'd already
stubbornly refused to make nice at the library, a
restaurant and an olive-tasting party -- and now she
was refusing to take a bath. Ah, two-year-olds. I'm
too old for this!
"But Jane," someone advised me, "she's obviously
rebelling against you because she is bored. She's
tired of doing little-kid things and now she wants to
do big-kid things." I'll just bet that she does. And
what kind of big-kid things does she have in mind?
Declare wars, get drunk, pollute the air and/or lobby
to corrupt our politicians?
"What that kid needs is to go to a pre-school." Hey,
you might be right. So I trudged off to look at
pre-schools for Mena.
There's a neighborhood pre-school right down the block
from me, the Martin Luther King Child Development
Center, that is run by our school district and serves
as an inexpensive daycare provider for working parents
who might otherwise not be able to afford safe and
decent daycare. My son Joe went there 30 years ago --
and the place is still going strong. So I went over to
see if I could enroll Mena there too. No luck.
"There's a really good chance that we will be
permanently closing our doors forever on August 31,"
said one of the school's teachers. "The State is
cutting our funding." What?
Let me get this straight. California is going to cut
its funding for daycare for working parents and then
said working parents are going to get fired because
they can't show up for work without daycare -- and
then all these working parents will be forced to go on
unemployment? And this saves the state money how?
That's totally stupid.
"But government shouldn't be paying for people's
daycare," you might say. Well why not? We already pay
for billionaires' tax breaks -- even though statistics
prove that for every corporatist billionaire created
by outsourcing or subsidized weapons manufacturing or
Wall Street bailouts or tax breaks for the uber-rich,
approximately 100,000 working-class Americans sink
below our country's poverty line. If we are going to
flat-out subsidize billionaires, why can't we also
subsidize daycare for people who actually do pay
taxes?
And speaking of layoffs and things that our government
should or should not be spending money on, apparently
it's not okay for our government to spend money on
police and fire protection either. Oakland just laid
of 80 cops and San Jose just laid off 53 firefighters.
But if spending money on that stuff is also a no-no,
then what exactly SHOULD our government spend money
on? Apparently nothing -- except for corporate welfare
and wars.
I remember back in the day when the United States used
to have all kinds of surplus money -- more than enough
to fund education, infrastructure improvement,
libraries, firefighters, cops and even daycare. But
what happened to all that surplus money? Where did it
all disappear to? Hmmm. As far as I can tell, an awful
lot of it has been vacuumed off into America's
all-time four favorite money pits -- Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Israel and Iraq.
Little did we know when the Twin Towers were destroyed
back in 2001 that what we were watching on the
television screen was not just two buildings being
destroyed but also the United States economy's
destruction. It took mere hours for the World Trade
Center to fall. And it took almost a decade for our
economy to fall after it. But the causes were the same
-- and the results were the same. We were sold a bill
of goods and conned into spending our money on guns
instead of butter. And now there are guns everywhere
but there's no butter -- and no pre-schools either.
Sorry, Mena. You are just going to have to be bored.
And if we don't stop shoveling trillions of dollars
into America's favorite money pits in the Middle East,
by the time you're an adult, one of the big-kid things
you're gonna be doing is standing in an unemployment
line.
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