government – The Corrigan Encore

Consumers and or Citizens

August 11, 2022 John Corrigan

Just recently in the United States the government signed into law a pretty extensive budget package. The money in the package will go towards combating climate change and inflation.

Some people are very vocal about the law because this will involve a tax to help pay for the changes made. The tax is minimum almost non existent for most of the population and actually not an abhorrent amount for the wealthy. By wealthy I mean anyone making over 400000 dollars a year.

When I hear citizens complain about taxes that they will not pay or are less that 2 % of their income I start to wonder why. The climate crisis that our world is facing is one of the largest crisis that humanity has ever faced and it is existential. To pay just a little bit of money in taxes is well worth the continued existence of the human race.

I think part of the problem is that in the United States many of the citizens have been conditioned to be Consumers first then citizens. I have seen this ideology with Union votes in factories and warehouses. The major reason most people vote against unionization in a warehouse or factory is that the employer promises that they will raise the cost of their goods if a Union is voted in. A good citizen would support safe working conditions and equitable pay that comes with a good workers union, however a consumer would only care what a good cost them. The same attitude seems to be going on with the climate. A good citizen would support laws that address climate change but a consumer would care less bot the climate and more about the cost of goods produced.

Money is a medium of exchange, it is a payment for resources or services. The resources that money can buy like clean water and safe food those are what matters not really the money. Being a good citizen should have very little to do with money and everything to do with how a nation or world divides and uses their natural resources.

I wonder how much better would our world be if as a society we focused less on money and more on.. well everything else?

Women and Chldren

May 25, 2022 John Corrigan

The stories about the evacuation of the Titanic have the famous statement “women and children first”, when loading the life boats. The story goes that women and children were helped onto the Titanic and loaded first. Why? Well, children are our legacy. Children carry on the species through time and therefore must survive. It is natural that we protect our children. Women bare children. When the Titanic sank the gender norms basically gave the role of caring for and raising children to women. So loading the Life boats with Women and Children first made sense.

It still makes sense today to take special effort to protect and care for women and children. However as a society the United States is doing a poor job of providing for women and children.

Yesterday I was publishing my podcast and news of a school shooting was in my feed. 19 children and 2 adults were shot and killed in Texas. Every year in the United States an average of 7,957 children are shot. The mortality rate for women in the United states is among the lowest in the wealthiest countries in the world.

How can we correct this? Start caring about women and children more than we care about ourselves. There are laws that are not passed in the United States that would make it harder to buy guns. Lawmakers and voters do not support these laws. the law makers and voters say they do not support them because they would hinder their rights to buy guns. I am a simple man and what I hear is that women and children matter less to them than their rights. Women die from domestic abuse and poor health care a lot. There are laws that have been halted that would provide health care to a lot of women. The reason the lawmakers and voters choose to stop health care laws or reform? Cost is a big reason for the lack of health care reform and health care for women. People do not want to invest in the health of women or children.

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You and the nation that you live in will invest in and take care of what matters the most. The number one investment in the United States is the military. The military budget surges and not the good part of the military budget. Health care for soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen takes hits every year. Military schools and housing projects suffer budget cuts and are regularly shelved. Planes, war ships, munitions, and tanks are financed and roll off the assembly lines are rapid rates. Never stopping always producing and finding new ways to kill people.

America has and is still investing in death, Big time!! The lawmakers and voters for the lawmakers make some big money on war too. In 2021 lawmakers had over 1.5 million dollars of investments in the companies that built the machines that are used in war and “peace” operations of the US Military.

45 lawmakers voted against the background check law in the senate last year and have filibustered the law. all but three of the senators have and continue to take money from the NRA an organization dedicated to making it easy to buy and sell guns.

Protecting our women and children is the right thing but it is not profitable or easy and it seems all the United States cares about is money and efficiency not people. This is sad because people matter most.

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I think Orson Welles understood how important people are and should be. When asked if he ever cast a friend in a film instead of the right person he answered with frequently. When asked why…

Because I don’t regard art as the prime importance. I already told you that I prefer every other loyalty in life to arts
Orson Welles

If society is not loyal to at the very least its women and children I fear it will be lost. All that matters is each other. not profit or rights or freedom. If we have no women and children we have no future and no hope.

Wait what and huh???

January 6, 2022 John Corrigan

Last year the date was January 6 2021, I was at work in the factory and my watch and phone started blowing up with news and Facebook alerts. The news alerts read like; “Protests unfolding at the U.S. capital” and my Facebook alerts were like; “Republicans should be ashamed of themselves” and “Who says walls will keep people out (this one had a Getty image of protesters turned insurrectionists / terrorists climbing the United States Capital wall)” and “It’s our house (this one on Facebook had an AP image with the protester / insurrectionists / terrorists marching through the halls of the capital damaging public property looking for blood)”. I was knee deep in a work project so the alerts went noticed but un read, about an hour later while on break I sifted through the alerts and thought it was a joke. After I realized this was actually happening and I was basically seeing it unfold in Realtime I felt some of the same feelings I felt on September 11, 2001. I was at work on that day as well and I got the alerts then too. I was stopped by a fellow coworker and told to go to the break room and watch tv with them. On September 11, 2001 I watched the events in Realtime on the breakroom tv with coworkers, on January 6, 2021 almost 20 years later I watched the events on my break from my phone alone. The feelings on September 11, 2001 were that the country was being attacked, the feeling from January 6, 2021 was also that the country was being attacked. My country was attacked my capital was attacked. The difference was that, on September 11, 2001 my country was attacked from an “outsider or groups of outsiders” and my fellow citizens were there with me in the breakroom, on January 6, 2021 my country and capital were attacked from fellow citizens, there was no fellowship or comradery on January 6, 2021 there was only terror and the feeling of being alone.

After the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital, the alone feeling persisted. There was even a debate on who attacked the capital many claimed it was a “false flag” operation and not as bad as people in the media made it out to be. It has been one year since the attack on the United States capital, one year since the vice president was hunted for in the halls of the capital and there is still debate as to who was responsible for the leadership of the terrorists at the capital and why it all happened.

We are living in strange times, today some people who were involved in the attack on the capital are running for public office. I try really hard to post uplifting things here and I have turned this attack on January 6, 2021 every which way to look for some positive spin but I cannot do it. The people who attacked the capital weren’t hungry or living in a country without direct elections like the people in Kazakhstan. The people who attacked the capital were not being shot by police officers or kept out of schools work public places or lynched because of the color of their skin. The people who attacked the protest were upset that their leader did not get re elected, that was the reason the capital was attacked and the vice president was hunted after! See? nothing positive there… So if there is nothing good to say about January 6, 2021 why even mention it at all? Well, I wanted to mention it because there is an investigation into how and why this happened, how is pretty much answered but the why is going to take a long time. The why is very important. Why did a group of people who are not in the aggregate hungry, poor, under represented feel the need to attack the government that works to make sure they are taken care of. I am not sure why but I think that perception is a big part of it. The protestors that became insurrectionists and terrorists’ thought that they were not being represented, and they thought they were poor. The mob forgot that they were part of a nation and failed to see their neighbors and family and friends. In a fit the mob allowed a rally to turn into a terroristic attack.

I think that the why to the attack lies in the fact that no one in that mob cared about their neighbors. I think the positive we can take from the attack is a life lesson. When we fail to consider our neighbor chaos ensues and we get the anarchy of Jan 6 and Sept 11. If either of those groups would have considered their neighbors I am positive they would have acted differently. We should all take a page from the book of the great Fred Rogers.

Even the bible and almost all religious texts demand that we treat our neighbors kindly. Tragedy like the attack on the capital is memorialized best through actions and I think a great action today tomorrow and forever is to be kind to our neighbors and when you think about it everyone is our neighbor.

peace

John3c