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“Is Ed Gay?”
by Sudhama Ranganathan •
Saturday, Dec. 18, 2010 at 8:56 PM
uconnharassment@gmail.com
Right now, with so many important and crucial things going on in the world and in our nation some of the things we wonder about as a nation at times seem trivial. It’s natural, for whatever reasons, to be curious about others and even to try and define them as one thing or another. Be it true or not, we eventually go on and learn things which either enforce our notions of those people or change them and it can keep things interesting. There are whole industries built up around such things like our interest in celebrity and building them up then tearing them down.
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But, wondering about such things can get a little out there. We often wonder about people’s private lives and all the while get distracted from what’s really important. With so much needing our attention like the two wars we could really be focused on more than the trivial – as interesting a distraction as the trivial can be. With all the troops serving over the holiday season there are plenty of reasons to list and I suppose to try not to dwell on realities we wish weren’t, but are currently powerless to change.
Right now with so many broken promises from Washington and no clear way out there are some reasons to say, “hey I heard this,” “have you heard that” or to perk up when someone else tells us about something gossipy they heard to be true whether it actually is true or not. The economy is not better and the most recent jobs numbers say unemployment actually got worse – not that the politicians need to tell us how hard it is to get a job right now. Though real legislative compromises have not really gotten started yet, there has been some willingness for this side to give on this issue while that one gives over there.
They even snuck in a new under the radar stimulus, which meant Republicans agreed to break with the promises they made to the Tea Party, just to get this passed. What it meant for them was two years of tax cuts and a win with the extension of the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Although Warren Buffett and Bill Gates said the wealthy don’t need them, that was the compromise. In the end we keep the tax cuts and get an increase in the amount of spending of tax dollars.
So, both sides backed off their rhetoric, and as was thought would happen, Republicans sold the Tea Party out. To get it passed nobody said a word about it, and the “Tea Party” establishment who promised no compromise, no new spending and no quarter for Republicans who broke said campaign promises have not uttered a single word. Too late now, and the new Republicans have not even been sworn in yet.
Important things to concentrate on might be how this new deal will get the economy pumping over the next few years. The real deal was not on the extension of tax cuts or not. That was on the injecting of new stimulus dollars into the economy and the president just quietly signed that into law. But really, to think we could get through our economic woes without more stimulus dollars is a little ridiculous.
The Germans and the Chinese had large stimulus efforts and they both have continued to grow. There are alternatives, but the real and most honest proponents have admitted that would mean we would lose our standard of living for possibly years and that our economy would crash for a time. Not many Americans, no matter what parts of Republican Tea Party rhetoric we each can agree with, really are ready for that. Ever talk to a fellow American who has been to a third world country for the first time?
Well that third world country would be a constant possible reality for all of us. Let us hope this stimulus, just passed by an overwhelming majority of Republicans and signed into law by the president means things, will change for the better. The living conditions for the middle class have stagnated since the seventies and actually started to shrink since Bush 2. Let’s hope things will get better with this recent stimulus the Tea Party obviously agreed to, as they have said nothing about it and have in fact been hyping up the deal all across cable news as a win for Republicans.
Then the necessity for the recent distracting fill of talk about which celebrities were gay or not and the like will become less important as the economy recovering will be something the administration can trumpet. Right now the unemployment numbers rising are not good for our future and say that the efforts of both sides since 2008 have been fruitless. And right now distracting silliness like “Snoop Dogg got caught with a transsexual,” or whatever, just isn’t making the grade. We really want to hear the troops are coming home, promises have been kept and people have jobs. That would be much better than whether or not Ed is gay or whatever.
To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
