Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
How about some good news for a change? News that has nothing to do with Donald Whatzizname. News you might even use.
It’s about “The Library of Things,” a real library, but different. Just as our public libraries share a wealth of publications — this one in Brunswick, Maine, also maintains a wealth of tools, devices, equipment and other “things” for people to check out, use and return.
Hazel Onsrud, a creative, can-do spirit on the staff of Brunswick’s Curtis Memorial Library, initiated this commonwealth of some 1,500 products that locals can borrow for free. The New York Times reports that residents are flocking to this pragmatic, beneficial resource for the common good. And why wouldn’t they? After all, not everyone can afford a $350 KitchenAid mixer of their own and a roto-tiller you might use once a year could be shared by many. Also, a bullhorn, a grain mill, a ukulele, an embossing machine — seriously, we should borrow, rather than thinking each of us must buy and store these things ... or do without.
This concept reduces each family’s expenses, waste and accumulation of “stuff,” while advancing cooperation and community. And the public library infrastructure is already in place to make it available.
This idea is not new, nor is it unique to Brunswick. In fact, America’s progressive populist movement of the 1870s built an entire economic alternative to corporate monopoly around this very concept. And today, some 2,000 “libraries-of-things” are already functioning worldwide, giving ordinary people a grassroots way to avoid profiteering, corporate consumerism.
Hazel Onsrud has issued a challenge to us: “If a few of us can do this in Maine,” she says, “anyone can.” And you and I are the anyones to do it.
An essential part of our children’s education is learning proper moral behavior. And who better to deliver that ethical guidance than politicians?
Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP’s theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity’s Ten Commandments. It’s in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It’s also ludicrously hypocritical — after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods ... and otherwise mocking the Christian religion’s own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they’re fooling?
Certainly not America’s free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state’s Republican leaders: “The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government,” he wrote, “are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls ... But faith loses its power when it’s forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion ... Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity.”
The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America’s official religion. As Sharda warns, “Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness — before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we’ve torn down.”
Texas: What the Hell? The Lone Star State’s government, a wholly owned corporate subsidiary, solidified its ranking this year as America’s number one innovator of really bad public policies.
Branching out from their usual corrupt collusion with Big Oil, industrial polluters and other profiteering hucksters, the governor and top lawmakers came up with a whole new batch of legalized slick-um, specifically to protect and profit a new Texas stock market for big money dealers. Who needs it? After all, beaucoup markets already exist for speculators and such. Yes — but those markets are at least loosely regulated to protect investors — plus, some states want to tax stock-trading profits.
So here come Texas politicos, pushing a cutely named “Y’all Street” stock exchange, promising that it’ll be “speculator-friendly.” Friendly means limp regulation, little public disclosure of schemes and hostility to taxation.
For example, to spare rich stock profiteers from paying their share of taxes (like working stiffs do), Republican leaders have graciously acted to prevent state taxation on the massive profits speculators get from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. And, to prove their undying plutocratic love for the rich, lawmakers plan to engrave this special tax break in the Texas Constitution, effectively closing off rich people’s ill-gotten gains as a source of revenue for the state’s future needs.
This Lone Star stock market is a cynical big-government scam to further enrich the privileged few, hoping to shift the cost of basic public services away from those most able to pay onto the backs of workaday families. If you wonder how inequality happens, study the Texas example. And hurry — the right-wing intends to bring it to your state next.
A headline on a recent news article caught my eye, for it declared, “Americans Disagree on Everything.”
I said to myself, “I disagree with that!”
Indeed, the untold story of today’s America is the good news that We the People fundamentally agree on more than what supposedly separates us. It is true that our daily media feed does relentlessly push political negativity and discord, and it’s true that hyper-partisan politicians grab attention by hammering their narrow views into swords of hatred. But that’s them, not the greater us.
Even hot-button issues that dominate the internet and talk shows are not actually all that divisive for the majority of us. For example, nearly 90% of Americans (including two-thirds of Republicans) oppose the right-wing attempt to whitewash our nation’s history by restricting teachers, museums, etc., from addressing such realities as slavery.
More significantly, consider the real needs of ordinary workaday families. Basics like living wages, protecting Social Security, busting up monopolies, cleaning up pollution, providing affordable housing, funding our parks and libraries and stopping price gouging. Overwhelmingly, Americans in red, blue and purple areas agree on what government ought to be doing — and disagree with what it is doing. But the plutocratic moneyed elites that now fund and perpetuate America’s corrupt and dysfunctional government profit by promoting hatreds to pit us against each other, praying that all of us don’t focus on them.
Don’t succumb to their self-serving lies but seek ways to unite in what we Americans do agree on — specifically our historic commitment to the democratic values of economic fairness, social justice and equal treatment for all. Anything less is BS.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
