I'm not, myself, a huge history geek, though I do read some history, and I follow a few history blogs (EOTW is my favorite). How anyone, though, who does not have her head inserted an entire meter up her ass, can buy the revisionist history that the RW has been peddling about Reagan over the past years, I would like to know.
See, I lived through the Reagan years. I remember how horrible they were. Reagan unleashed the viciousness and the hate. He made it cool to be racist, to be evil, to be selfish. He made someone like Rush possible. I remember the transformation of America -- how previously sane sorts began to say racist, hateful, nasty things, and to say to me, this is what everyone believes, we're just honest enough to say it in public!
That shit is Reagan's legacy. That.
That, and deregulation, and the destruction of America's safety net, and the damage to our environment, and the celebration of greed, and the celebration of racism, and the idea that being kind was somehow evil (oh, I hate this PC nonsense, my students still say to me, somehow thinking they're being brave and bold) -- that's what Reagan did to this country.
Hurt the decent things about us, and encouraged the worst bits of our nature.
This is what I like about Obama: he might be taking us in the other direction.
America wants to be a good country, most of us. Maybe it's not too late.
2 comments:
Our health care is in the state it's in now because of Reagan. It was Reagan who put the power of health care in the hands of the fucking insurance companies and out of the hands of the health care professionals. He allowed the insurance folks to demand oupatient surgeries, predetermined hospital stays, and treating symptoms instead of finding the cause. Reagan, in his hayday, almost bankrupted hospitals and left many of us nurses with part time work because when the deregulation of the insurance companies let them run a muck, the hospital beds, for the first time in decades, were empty. In order for all of us to get some sort of a paycheck, all of us had our hours cut. And I will never forget the day that ketchup became a vegetable in the school lunch program and the cost of one place setting at the white house was in the thousands. Reagan almost whipped out the middle class and starved the poor and because of his crap, we had our first real case of multitudes of people living in their cars and children and their parents living under bridges. Yeah, he was a real fucking winner. NOT.
God, yes. I remember all that. I remember how bad everything got. Those are the years when everyone *knew* western civilization was going to fall -- because of him and his WV.
And you remember the Welfare Queen crap and State's Rights crap and "strapping young buck" shit he started? I still hear from people in my old neighborhood about how all "those people" work under the table, doing nails and painting houses, and really have plenty of money, how "they" trade their food stamps for drugs and liquor and drive around in BMWs, how people have 20 kids so they can collect more welfare, about four generations of welfare -- those are all Reagan talking points.
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