The World According to Rich

The World According to Rich

I just had an exchange with my red, but supposedly anti-Trump friend Kevin. This is that text group that I have been engaged with for several years that used to be two Florida residents (read that was them being red in political orientation) and one too blue Californian (blue ex-New Yorker…same thing). We added another friend from Arizona, Steve, who is appropriately purple, less by political leaning and more by simply being less irritatingly blue as I seem to be. Along the way, we seem to offended the reddest member, Roger, who has since rejoined the group claiming that the ski season was his reason for dropping out and not his disgust with my liberal ideology.

The tread started with a quote I sent from Ronald Reagan about the importance of immigration to the prosperity of America. Kevin agreed with the quote, saying that he agrees with almost everything Ronald Reagan said and did. But he went on to say that he is a fan of legal immigration and that what is going on at the border is crazy. My response was that I agree and feel that its a shame that Republicans are hell-bent on NOT solving the border crisis right now since it is a wonderful political cudgel in their opinion (excuse me, in Trump’s opinion) that they would rather not solve between now and the November election. Kevin cannot help himself from stirring the pot and I fully expect any commentary from me on Republicans to be met with a rejoinder, sensible or non-sensical, putting the blame back on Democrats. He wondered whether Democrats want the issue to stay on the political playing field as well. I had to remind him that the Democrats in the Senate agreed to the harshest border reform we have ever seen, admittedly as a compromise path to getting the Ukraine aid funding we so desperately need, only to have the Republican House ignore the bill at Trump’s insistence.

In typical fashion, Kevin realized that facts were getting in the way of his fun with me, so he swerved just a bit into a different lane. He asked why the border got so overrun with illegal immigrants right after Joe Biden took office. My response was that perhaps it was because the cruelty of Trump’s border policies like separating families so they could never find their children again may have made for an immigration backlog at the border that suddenly felt safer to cross after the election…making special note that it went on pause until it was clear that Trump’s attempted insurrection did not succeed. He wondered aloud if that meant I felt Biden did the right thing at the border. Naturally, that forced me to agree that there was much improvement needed at the border but that it takes Congressional action to make that happen and that Biden alone, much less Secretary Mayorkas alone can make that happen. I reminded him that unlike him, I live in a border city and that I see none of the problems that the Republicans like to tout and scream about. I told him that we LIKE our immigrant pool of labor a lot down here. He deflected, particularly on the last point and pondered why I would think that the border being overrun by illegal immigration was a Trump and Republican made problem.

I had to state my views more clearly. I said that we, as a country and as an economy NEED more, not less immigration (just like Ronald Reagan said). What Trump did to restrict it was a political tactic and it was inhumane. Biden has refused to act that way and has allowed more illegal immigration in the face of inadequate legal reform, which seems to be a tradeoff he is prepared to make that I agree is better than the inhumanity of the Republican approach to people in need. I reminded him that our border policy has been fucked up for thirty years or more and that it is simply wrong to blame it all on Biden as Republicans like to suggest. It takes a bi-partisan solution to make it better and right now there is only one party at that table and its not Republicans.

That opened me up to a monologue about the fact that I don’t consider the border to be anywhere near the biggest problem that we face in this country right now. I went on to share my worldview as I see it by enumerating the priorities of our biggest issue faced as a nation. They are:

1. Saving our democracy from another Trump presidency

2. Getting Ukraine back in the business of stopping Putin and his evil attempts to dismantle the liberal democracy of the West, country by country.

3. Getting Netanyahu out of office or at least more tolerant of a two-state solution in order to bring some semblance of peace to Gaza and the Middle East.

4. Figuring out how we position ourselves vis-a-vis the elephant in the room, which I believe to be China and where it plans to take itself with its next moves, both politically and economically.

5. Getting our complete and modern infrastructure (writ large to include such thins as internet access and regulation as well as childcare) positioned and funded for the next several generations of American prosperity, and

6. Solving the impending pension crisis, which means more egalitarian and progressive taxation that is very necessary for future world stability. I went on to explain that we simply need to be more enlightened about how we look at the world and the way we treat the massive population it holds. We need to help the entirety of humanity improve the quality of their lives through education and opportunity. I believe this was the ideal we established as a world when we founded the United Nations after WWII and its the only saving grace for our way of life and for our ultimate humanity. I say this less for me and more for the wellbeing of our collective grandchildren.

I was d to see that Kevin ended up agreeing with all of my points except for the bit about increasing taxation. I consider that a major victory for the morning and never expected him to get worn down so much by my tenacity as to let anyone touch his wallet. That would have been far too much to expect. But I do believe in my heart of hearts that the principles I espouse about a more enlightened world are fundamentally agreed to by most people, but naturally, nobody wants to get down to the hard reality of paying for it out of their pocket. One would think it would be easier for people who’s Maslowian need have largely been met and their surplus wealth should pain them little to part with, but that isn’t usually the case. the drive and ambition that lead to excessive wealth accumulation creates a hyper-competitiveness that is hard to overcome simply by logic and sufficiency. Perhaps in the world according to Rich, that should be the next challenge for the psychosocial scientists to address.