Baltimore is burning, Katmandu collapsing but here in Michigan we got
serious problems. Potholes. The situation is so desperate that our Governor is scurrying like a rat terrier chasing a chipmunk from Marquette to Monroe, sniffing out the worst. Locating them isn't hard; they’re usually surrounded by the Guv’s press people and lethargic local news media dispatched to record Snyder slip into his superhero costume of plastic hard hat and hi vis safety vest, grab a chrome plated shovel, deposit a modest dollop of asphalt into the offending gaping maw and proclaim that Proposal 1 will fix the roads.
Proposal 1 is a potion so magically powerful that it seems to have been compounded in some advanced elixir class at a Republican Hogwarts Academy. It is guaranteed to fix the roads, fund the schools, render aid to the poor, brighten your laundry, erase the dull gleam of stupidity from your children’s eyes and relieve the painful burning and rectal itching of inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue. All for the low price of one cent on every buck you spend in Michigan from now until the second coming of Christ.
If you believe the TV ads, everybody supports this bill. Repubs, Dems, police, firefighters, bedwetters, sexual deviants, everyone from Alfonse J. BeBop III right through to Xena, Warrior Princess. Because it’s all about the safety of our children, of course.
That’s why the boys from the Laborers Union shoveled all the beer cans and cigarette butts from the back of the Boulder Bus, loaded her up on a trailer and hit the road in support of Prop 1.
The Boulder Bus is something Ken Kesey might have dreamed up if he had taken too much acid. It is a standard yellow school bus but if you examine it closely you might notice something strange. A large chunk of asphalt, presumably part of a collapsed bridge, has crushed and embedded itself at the front end of the bus, smooshing the driver’s station. It’s not a bus from an actual accident. It’s a cautionary, This-Could-Happen-to-YOUR-Kids, bus. I suspect the boulder is actually polystyrene foam made at a display shop but with the laborers you never know. They just might have had a chunk of bridge laying around from a demo job, an old bus behind the hall they used as a drinking shanty, and voila’, boulder meets bus.
I admire their pluck, but the task they’ve undertaken is Sisyphean, both in rolling this boulder across the state and getting the voters to roll over and vote for Prop 1.
Let’s acknowledge this right now: We, as a society, do not give three tenths of one half percent of a dismal and wilted fuck about other people’s kids. We’ve tested it and proven it and reproven it so many times that if it were a scientific experiment it would be established fact.
After the death camps were discovered in Germany at the close of World War II civilians from nearby towns were transported to the camps for a little walk through, to see just what was going on at these places, things they claimed not to know about and chose to ignore. It’s grueling just watching the film of this event, self-proclaimed innocence crumbling before the shame and horror of actual complicity.
No one slapped a bloody classroom from Sandy Hook Elementary on the back of a semi-trailer, took that show on the road and rubbed our noses in it. Someone probably should have. We may not have been so limp-wristed in allowing the NRA Bus to roll over all those suffering families. . .
So it’s not surprising that the Save-the-Life-of-My-Child approach may not win the day for Prop 1. What I find surprising-and disingenuous-is the We-Are-All-in-This-Together-Brother-and-Sister-Citizens! argument. This patent bullshit.
The Snyder administration and Republican Legislature has demonstrated over the past five years that we are decidedly not in it together.
One of the early moves was taxing retirement pensions. Retirees are in. Part two of the tax move was tax cuts to businesses in almost the same amount that taxing pensions had raised. Businesses are now out. What a coincidence.
Last year we had a vote in which the citizens overwhelmingly voted against wolf hunting. The vote was politically symbolic but legally meaningless; the Legislature had appointed a commission to determine the status of species to be hunted, negating a popular vote. (The only member of the commission with an actual degree in wildlife management & biology was the lone dissenting vote against wolf hunting.)
Message to voters? You guys are too dumb to decide this.
(Ironically, after the smoke of the election cleared, a federal judge relisted the grey wolf as an endangered species in Michigan. Now you can’t shoot a wolf even if it is disemboweling your toy poodle Mr. Tinkles on your back deck. Only if a wolf is directly threatening human life-something that occurs mostly to characters freezing their asses off and starving to death in a Jack London story-can you plug it. The wolf hunting boys have shot themselves in the foot.)
But when the smoke signals puffing out of the capitol in December, 2012 spelled “AFL-CIO: GFY!” the message was clear and unambiguous. Right to Work rebooted the mindset of the citizen to unaccountability, zero participation and responsibility while retaining full access to all privileges and benefits accorded to others who have worked and paid for them.
It explicitly made it acceptable to expect to enjoy the benefits of a society without participating in building, supporting or maintaining that society.
It’s madness to expect people to pitch in together for the commonweal when you have demonstrated contempt for the very notion of shared sacrifice.
I’m going to posit here that what we need is not Prop 1 to fix the roads but rather the
Right to Drive.
Here’s the logic: I like to drive. I like to drive on nice roads. I don’t think the legislature, or a vote of the people has the right to make me pay for things I like doing. POHBORB! (Pursuit of Happiness, Bill ‘O Rights, Bitches!) I will pursue happiness driving on Michigan’s nice roads as long as someone else pays for them. I may disagree with them, hold them in disdain as a bunch of socialist scum but I still maintain my right to drive on the roads they pay for.
Why stop there? Why not the Right to do Whatever the Fuck I Want to Do? We can get the Canadians to pay for that one. They’re already paying to build us an international bridge and the U.S. Customs Plaza to boot. They expect us to pay them back in the future. Dumbasses …