The Otherwise Party
I’m thinking there are three natural parties in America. The ‘Bloodsucker’ Party. The ‘I Got Mine’ Party. And the ‘Over My Dead Body’ Party.
I’m talking about the 0.1%, the 9.9%, and the 90%. The ‘ownership’ class, the ‘professional’ class, and the ‘working’ class. Let’s stop pretending we’re two parties. Or four. And sort ourselves out:
The Bloodsucker (BS) Party is made up, of course, of bloodsuckers. The uber-wealthy. Whose money makes money. But the party also has a bunch of suckers in it. It’s like 100k bloodsuckers, and 100M suckers. Maybe it should be called the Sucker Bloodsucker (SBS) Party. Those suckers are being sold a bill of goods. They think they’ll be bloodsuckers some day. So they keep voting to give their future selves more bloodsucking powers. (They really belong in the Over My Dead Body party. More on that later.)
The I Got Mine (IGM) Party is all the VERY comfortable folks with VERY good-paying $200–500k-a-year-jobs. They aid and abet the Bloodsucker Party. Because, while they like to think of themselves as liberal, and progressive, and ‘for’ working families, and all the right good things, the truth is that they very much do not want THEIR world to change. At all. Which actually makes them VERY conservative. If not regressive. Nevermind all the goodness.
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The Over My Dead Body (OMDB) Party is everybody else. Everybody working VERY hard to make ends meet. And the ends never meet. Which is why more and more of us are dying in debt. Seriously. Look it up. Every year it gets harder. Every year it gets more expensive to be poor. To the extent that working families in America have HAD it. And they are saying, finally, “NO! You CAN’T have it all. You CAN’T suck the life out me and my kids. Just to fuel your jets and fill your swimming pools. No freaking way! Absolutely not! OVER MY DEAD BODY!”
The OMDB folks are from all walks of life. All races, all backgrounds. City folks, country folks. We’ve seen them saying ‘NO!’ through the Occupy movement. And the Black Lives Matter movement. And the Me Too movement. And the Tea Party movement. And the Sanders movement. Even the Trump movement. Over my dead body. You can’t USE me anymore!
Now if you took all the suckers from the SBS party. And added them to all the had-its from the OMDB party. You’d have a coalition of literally about 90% of the country. Everybody who’s not uber-wealthy, or VERY comfortable. Everyone who NEEDS the system to change enough that they can be comfortable ENOUGH.
Just comfortable enough to not worry too much about basic survival needs. Food. Shelter. Water. Work. School. Just comfortable enough to have a CHANCE. At life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just comfortable enough that those things do not feel permanently, irretrievably off the table.
How ‘bout we start a new party? Call it the Comfortable Enough party. If we did that, just that, don’t you think the Bloodsuckers might join? And the I Got Mines? Because, if everybody’s comfotable ENOUGH, then the BSs can keep sucking that blood, and the IGMs can keep what’s theirs. And the rest of us will have ENOUGH of a shot at life to not come after… what came out of us.
Just a tip for the 10%. Cuz otherwise… it’s the Otherwise Party.
