Perspective

One of the things I've noticed as I've grown older is that events happened in the distant past, counterintuitively seem more recent and pertinent. When i was in high school, it seemed that anything happened before the Kennedy assasination was in a different world. Now I can not only see clearly the ways we're still "fighting the civil war" but, in the current populations of the western Hemishpere, see the results of migration patterns that were laid out in the fifteen hundreds.

This perspective is helpful because it helps remind us that things we now all agree are "unthinkable" like slavery and naziism are really NOT all that far removed from our current era. We're still nowhere near as civilized as we give oursleves credit for.

Wisconsin

It pays to remember that we are just now witnessing the second shoe dropping on the long-term 'starve the beast' strategy. All the whining you hear about "there's no money", "We're broke" and "the spending is unsustainable" are a direct result of the decade long mantra of 'cutting taxes will grow the economy" and "It doesn't make sense to punish our most productive sector". The fact that cutting taxes didn't grow the economy and that corporations have been particularly stingy in the "job creation" even though profits are at pre-recession levels reminds us that if we let the Republicans get their way, we'll be right back to the stagnation that marked the Bush years (only with a higher baseline of unemployment.)

Blaming public sector workers for what's wrong with our economy is a particularly brazen crock but apparently there's no shortage of people willing to play along.