And we’re supposed to be grateful.

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We’re getting another payment… yippee… I hope you can recognize the sarcasm in my writing. After months of back and forth “negotiations,” Congress has finally passed a second economic stimulus, promising payments of $600 for each adult making up to $75,000 (or $150,000 for married couples). This is half of what we got earlier in the year, and we’ve had to endure months of hardship as a nation. People have been out of work or having to cut back for months, and we’ve heard story after story of how either political party stalled talks for whatever reason. That reason, of course, was the election, and the political partisanship has permeated our society so thoroughly that not even a pandemic could disrupt it.

And in comes the media, proclaiming how good it is that our elected officials passed a 5,000 plus page stimulus hours after receiving it, with little time to read or even gloss over the contents. Small businesses will get some help, but if past precedent tells us anything, it will be abused by those with the connections to see it through as the American people continue to struggle through winter.

We are not thankful for our elected officials taking the bread and throwing us the crumbs. Yes, we’ll take it because we must, but it is a bitter and tasteless morsel of food that has been thrown on the floor, and the people at the table laugh as they rip off chunks for themselves and their friends.

I have mentioned the fall of the Roman Empire in my last post, and more and more I think that we’re seeing history repeat itself. The corruption from within is becoming more and more evident, the illusion of “the greater good,” fading away more and more as people realize that the things promised to them were mere words, and the people who made those promises were only after power. I don’t trust the government to “help.” I don’t think that the American people should either, but time and again, the American people believe in the righteousness of our institutions to our own detriment. We elect people who want to make a difference, and yet we fail to hold them accountable when they break their promises. We are left choosing between two brands of politics that continue to reinforce the door keeping out the rest of the population from their ivory tower. We elected Trump as a rebuke of those policies, but turned away from it because he had a toxic personality. We elected Joe Biden because we value kind words more than our own betterment.

H.L. Menken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Which seeing as how the people have elected a guy closely tied to China through family connections and a generally positive disposition toward the Communist nation, we certainly seem to fit the bill. In the middle of a pandemic with closures that have crippled the economy and have pushed millions of people out of work, we are supposed to be happy that the government can only seem to pass funding in large vomitus chunks. While there are things that are needed (extended unemployment benefits and specific PPP loans for hard-hit communities), there are other slabs of pork within the second stimulus and other emergency funding bills.

And the most frustrating part is that we the People are so busy pissing each other off that the establishment types continue apace with little regard for their own behaviors. They continue to pass edicts and use police officers, most of whom are just trying to make a living, to enforce these measures. We attack each other over petty differences, keeping each other down like crabs in a pot, not wanting anyone on our level to escape. I don’t know whether we should blame the elites or ourselves more. We’ve grown accustomed to the easy way and the government promises that now, when they wish to begin taking everything away, and resetting the balance of power, we are left wondering why no one stood up to it before. Like the old quote said, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I put it to you. Be vigilant and watch the events unfolding over the next few years. This may very well be the generation that goes from liberty to slavery. We face a dire choice, with tough ramifications and consequences regardless of the actions taken. We face hard times and tight belts. But it is said that hard times breed good men. I believe it’s long overdue for good men again.