Letter to the Editor: Politically speaking

Having survived a traumatic childhood with “someone else telling you what to do, to say, to eat, to think, where you can go and with whom,” but not yet to the stage of settling down, choosing a career, having mortgage payments, car payments, dishes to wash and a lawn to mow . . , you hope to get that brief moment of freedom and glory: your first big dance. Politically speaking: what to wear? Do you go with the Hot Red Dress, or with the cool blue one?

Alarmed by the recent letter warning of the dangers of creeping socialism causing the citizens to relive the most traumatic events of their childhoods, I consulted with Wikipedia to ascertain how widespread the plague might be. Wikipedia noted 4 members of the House of Representatives who have identified themselves as promoting socialist theories: Jamaal Bowman (S) D New York, Cori Bush (S) D Missouri, Rashida Tlaib (S) D Mich., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (S) D NY.  On the Senate side, we can’t leave out Bernie; as far as I know, Senator Bernie Sanders (S)D Vermont, is the lone senator espousing socialist doctrine.

Subtracting 4 from 435 means that 431 members of the House of Representatives are not “card carrying socialists.”  I’ll trust that readers can do their own math pertaining to the Senate.

On the other side of the coin is Senator Rand Paul, R Kentucky, who justified his vote opposing the $15 an hour minimum wage, maintaining that minority teens and 20-year-olds would be left unemployed.  Was Sen Paul operating under the assumption that Americans of Northern European ancestry are entitled to bypass entry-level jobs?  Is there a magic springboard that allows some to jump beyond the lower rungs on the socio-economic ladder?  What, do you suppose, could have given the Senator that impression?

Rep. Andrew Clyde, R Georgia, took the viewpoint that the protests at the Capital on Jan. 6 were a “normal tourist visit.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, also a Republican from Georgia, has a quirk of shouting through mail slots, and blamed the ignition of the Camp Fire on space lasers with questionable funding sources.

One bit of wisdom gleaned from the late, great Powder Magazine, was that talented, aggressive, female skiers in the Tahoe area, when talking amongst themselves, would often say, “the odds are good, but the goods are pretty odd.”  There’s one more old saying: “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Gene Nielsen

Crescent Mills