Like many men of my age group, I had my mid-life crisis a few years ago. At this point in time, I perceive that nothing has changed since then. I still have feelings that my youthful goals and dreams are nowhere in sight for the future or accomplished in the past. With the loss of my best friend of 27 years and 9 months, most of the joy of life went with her. I now have no ambition, nowhere to go, no one to go there with, and no money to spend when I don’t arrive there.
I have been blessed with a modest amount of financial and medical security, but the Republican Party leadership is poised and planning to take even that mea-ger amount away by making major changes to existing law and pro-grams. Republican Paul Ryan has published his proposed budget for 2015. Bruce Lesley reported inThe Huffington Post [1 Dec 2014],”In the name of protecting children, the poor, and the states, the Ryan budget does the opposite.”
Like the Beatles’ Nowhere Man, the Republican Party’s proposed federal budget for 2015 is a “nowhere plan.” The republican leadership inhabit their “fortress of solitude,” listening to no one except budget extremists, and where they make all their plans for nowhere budgets for the benefit of nobody except the wealthy.
Nowhere does that nowhere plan contain the Affordable Care Act or the expansion of Medicare or uncapped Food Stamps or Public Radio or the endowment for the arts or Amtrak or even basic research grants or funding for educa-tion. Republican leaders are, “No way, No how, Nowhere Men”.
Somewhere, somehow, sometime, the Nowhere Men will find the way to fund their favorite project – weapons for war to either use or sell. After all, a good old fashioned war is great for business because war makes the rich richer.
Nowhere Men never learned the lessons of history: wars cost money, the outcome is never certain, and innocent nobodies will end up, no-where. “Nowhere Men wars” will take us all nowhere, somehow, in no time.
In exchange for a unique American culture of democracy and the American Dream, by defunding education, Public Radio, and the endowment for the arts, the Nowhere Men would have us embrace a culture of rule by the few wealthy Nowhere Men – an oligarchy based upon military strength and a subservient poor.
Nowhere Men would be well advised to remember that Democrats, Libertarians, Independents, other groups, and individuals also own guns and were trained to use them during combat in Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, and on the streets of major American cities.
© 1 December 2014
About the Author
I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.
When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.
I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.
My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com
