But on the other hand, people over 55 have plenty more to offer both in work and in culture. And they can be counted on for considered, consistent patriotism if their country should ask them to play a significant role in the reshaping of America's future.
Yesterday I declared all this to a conservative ideologue of my acquaintance, and he came back with, "Oh, from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs, eh, Bill?"
Now, I've read Karl Marx (don't know if you've read Marx), and I know that this phrase my friend WB pulled up comes from him. I think what my buddy were trying to do there, besides being snide (and around here in America I suppose that is fair game), was to redbait me, to imply that I was a communist (because, as you know, Americans have been thoroughly behaviorally modified to hate communists. "Communism-bad" was the most important meme of the 20th century).
If I was to be classified or characterized according to traditional ideological labels, I would undoubtedly be a socialist. I believe in limits to aggregate corporate growth and limits to personal wealth, while providing that people who are extraordinarily creative should be compensated extraordinarily, and that doesn't mean bank executives!
I believe that America has a national interest in providing health care for all its citizens, in the same way that almost every other "western" nation, and many "eastern" nations, do.
But what I really am is a world survivalist. Every single indicator of destabilizing world activity-- degree and rapidity of technological development, population, number of species extinctions-- that I can think of graphs as a hyperbola.
Species extinctions are increasing at a logarithmic rate, closely paralleling the rate of increase of world human population, since World War Two, and sharply turning up, chasing the ever receding Y-Axis of the present, in the last 20 years, or since the ubiquity of electronic technology.
This is unhealthy. This sort of graph is what the uncontrolled growth rate of CANCER looks like. We have to somehow truncate, or restore something like the linearity of, those graphs!
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