Point-Counterpoint

Point-Counterpoint
by Cate Cavanagh

While sitting GOP congresspeople and senators decry the OWS movements claiming people should take baths and get jobs, that job creators should not have an increase in taxes but entitlements should be reamed their logistics beg the question: where is their logic?
While Herman Cain said that poor people who are not rich have only themselves to blame, he expects us to believe that, in his immense compassion, he helped a woman who had fallen upon hard times. I guess it really is not what you know but you know. The same can be said for our favorite Good Ol' Guy Newt who, as he admits to earning sixty thousand dollars per speech fails to see his denigration of poor working families, many of whom are also Republican, as not just insensitive but downright insulting. He presumes that all will be enlightened by his ignorant albeit play to the emotion rhetoric that the only money earned by the poor is via illegal means. He claims to know millionaires that get food stamp cards and people who can go to on vacation using same. What he clearly does not know is how little these stipends are and how they cannot be used for non-food items. He also does not know that there is a strict allotment in qualifying for food stamps. If a family is just one dollar over the income guide, that family is denied.
He seems to be longing for another time. A time in which there were no unions and hence unbearably long work hours for little pay, horrendous workplace conditions and no OSHA regulations. Ah. He longs for the glory days of child labor, strip mining to the danger of workers and a world in which work related injuries received no just compensation.
But how can we expect someone who simply doesn't know to remember that many senior citizens on social security receive barely eight hundred dollars a month. Nor can we really expect him to understand the medical needs of the disabled youthful and older alike. He simply does not know.
He does not know anymore than he knows that there is a world outside his circle of cronies where people are tired of having the elite knee gouging the base of the spine of struggling, working and increasingly poor families. He believes tomato sauce is a vegetable. Case in point. How can he know what he does not know?
He also does not get the movement in Wisconsin where Governor Walker WILL BE RECALLED because he simply doesn't get the fact that extreme social stratification will indeed breed discontent.
While Eric Cantor called the OWS protestors mobs the real crime lords are those of the GOP pandering false propaganda. What Newt and others of his ilk might also not realize is that voting Republicans may decide not to vote against their own self interests next go round.
There has been a global consensus concerning OWS sadly, some protests have become violent but these outbursts have been few when one considers the masses that have joined in one voice against an economic system that elevates the few while destroying the many.
No, Mr. Cantor. OWS protestors are not mobs although one must question the mentality of certain, not all, police forces that have acted in a manner reminiscent of the Civil Rights challenges of the sixties. After all, the protestors are also supporting the employment, benefits and pensions of the police as well.
It does indeed confound the imagination when fear overcomes common sense and common ground.
But, as many GOP candidates fail to recall their American history it is not a far reach that they also do not remember French history either. There was this little thing called the French Revolution where a dimwitted Marie Antoinette was clueless as well when she advocated the poor eat cake. So is it really a foregone conclusion to wonder what Newt ET AL expect poor children to eat?
There is an old adage that Newt and the others should be mindful of and that is simply that familiarity breeds contempt and that contempt might just show itself at the polls upcoming election day.

Cate Cavanagh has been a career family advocate and service coordinator for developmentally and physical disabled children and adults. She is a published syndicated columnist and author.

CATE CAVANAGH Author, HER GODMOTHER
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR, CHICKEN SOUP   FOR THE SOUL