So easy to look the other way as the most vulnerable leak though the cracks in the system and trickle away into the dust... cracks that were widened inadvertently or otherwise by fiscal and social conservatives dating back to the Reagan era. So easy to look at gutted social services budget and celebrate have more money for other things or even better lower taxes for corporations who pay little or none anyway... And that leaves The invisible in plain sight who no longer exist in a database. The system works! Works at finding numbers that certain people like, not numbers that reflect reality.
Reaganomics is an idea that demands reality should comply to it instead of a set of ideas that are derived from reality. Reaganomics = 1/3 cherry-picked reality and 2/3 wishful thinking and denial. (me)
This originally appeared as a comment on JR's excellent diary "Mike is Missing. I Think He's Dead."... a story of one homless man and wider implications of the legacy of the Reagan era's changes to the way indigent mental patients were cared for.
Thanks Ronnie. The amount of suffering that your obtuse faith in and your implementation of your mentors unfounded notions and fantasies has caused has been staggering. A double blessing that you would never have understood what you were responsible for in your final years. Even if you had not lost the rest of your capacity for understanding well before you died I still wonder if it would not have made any difference to your stubborn denial of the harm you have caused. You were a tragic disaster that was first unwilling and then then soon unable to comprehend what you did. Think of how many more died homeless, suffering from exactly what you yourself suffered from. And how many suffered in particular due to policies that you yourself helped implement or allowed to happen initially due to your own uncaring ignorance. How nice that these other Alzheimer's victims went quicker, starving and cold and not lingering on for many more years, loved and cared for as you were. Putting off the inevitable result for so long... would your fans today count it as mercy that so many have been and are being allowed to vanish faster, cheaper and denied? What a mercy they were a burden financially or otherwise for a much shorter time...
Reagan as a Laffer Curve Scrooge.
If there was any justice, would that just before you died most of your mental faculties briefly returned just long enough for some higher power to lay out before you what you had wrought.... just enough time to understand what a cruel travesty your "morning in America" feel-good lie was. Enough time for you to hand your head in shame and wonder if there was truly a next state of consciousness and if so that you will have to endure an indefinite awareness of what you were and are responsible for... feeling the additional pain and loneliness and hunger that each person suffered because of you.
Of course you were not directly and even indirectly to blame for a lot or most of their ills... but in a world where we fight to at least minimize the causes and ameliorate as much of the harm to those who cannot help themselves... you did exactly the opposite... ensured that more would come to harm and that there would be less hope of easing it after the fact. And if there was some way for a Ghost of Presidents past to visit you and revisit you and compel you to relive the lives of each of those whose lives your policies and notions blighted. Each and every one, their added hunger, fear and pain. One after the other in real time. Hopes dashed, turned away despised and shunned. How long would such a process take?
In such a hypothetical post life experience, how long would it take for the lesson to hit home to Ronnie to punish him and or make him aware of what he is in part to blame for? Perhaps it would be the first one or after just a few. But it would not end. For this Scrooge-like experience, just say NO, version of you would be not only be forced to meet and relive that person's life but even live a rerun of each life AS the person in real time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year... Maybe there would be 2 versions... the Ronnie-world version they lived and then one where Ronnie was never president. Really hammer home the difference he made to their lives...
A Billion years of Smiling Ronnie-Scrooge Purgatory?
It would take a long time to get through 2 versions of millions of lives. But as many would have us believe... some sort of eternity awaits and if so there would be plenty of time to replay them all; time enough for some sort of justice, punishment and understanding.....
Lets say there were only 1,000,000 people who suffered during and since your presidency, thrown out of mental homes, denied shelter and food because of your policies. (that's not counting others whose lives were blighted in that time by other things like slowing down the response to HIV/AIDS) And let's say these homeless with mental issues lived an average of 50 years... one million times 50 = fifty million x 2 versions of each person's life. That's conservatively 100 million years. And the nicer, null-Prez-Ronnie versions of their lives would be longer and not as dire and possibly better... And if it is more than 1 million blighted lives this life replay process could take a very long time... If this was true in some way I would say... Enjoy the ride, your guilty shame will be more than enough hell.
An Evil Irony:
But actually you should not be punished for selective stupidity or ignorance and a defective mind. Your turn to a conservative world view after being an FDR Democrat may have actually been a symptom of early Alzheimer's. An Evil Irony: If there was an evil one out there bedeviling mankind what a cruel jest this would be. A diminished man elevated to a position where he would happily acquiesce to the actual harm of many more with similar afflictions.
Your understanding and compassion seemingly trickled out of your mind and like trickle down economics it did not do much good to anyone else. It trickled out and vanished.
And the results of the ideas you pushed and approved of were even lauded and added to later... that is part of your legacy. And all the hagiographies that praise you cannot paper over the disaster that you represent. No president is perfect and no policy brings only good or only bad. But you unthinkingly chose way too many roads that led to more darkness. Your Morning in America was a gaudy, garish Kleig light fraud which cast many shadows that easily hid the newly outcast and shunned.
The trickle-away of compassion and fact, of cause and result, of resolve and awareness left a hollow self congratulatory but diminished shell of a self-serving type of conservatism. There is no one at home inside the soul of this Reaganomics Scrooge. the balance sheet of your humanity is found wanting. In a way I hope all who aided and abetted you spend a good few million years reliving what they caused. Maybe some understanding will trickle back in...