Social Question
Anybody want to wish Charles Dickens a happy birthday?
Today, if Charles Dickens were still with us, he would be 200 years old. He did a great deal to change our way of thinking about economics, morality and social order. His name has come to stand for the age of wage slavery and class warfare we now call Dickensian England. His landmark work, A Christmas Carol gave voice to the millions like Bob Crachit kept in perpetual wage slavery by a ruling class of plutocrats and financiers the likes of Ebeneezer Scrooge.
Today, when so many among the middle class and even the working poor have been seduced by the clever bumper-sticker slogans that would be oligarchs of today pay PhD filled think tanks to generate for them, isn’t it time to ask if we want to follow the regressives? They may claim to be conservatives, but they do not want to do what true conservatives do; which is maintain existing social order and use tried-and-true solutions wherever possible. That is what the word “conservative” means. See definition 2b in the link immediately above.
Quite the opposite of conservativism, the current conservative movement is really a radical regressive movement. Some wish to turn the clock back to the wage slavery of the Gilded Age from 1865 to 1895 when Robber Barons set up massive trusts and cartels to manipulate markets and enrich themselves at the expense of a populace held down by wage slavery, child labor and brutal suppression of any efforts at worker protection or fairness. They yearn for the days when there was no food safety and food poisoning epidemics were commonplace and deadly. Never mind that this age set the conditions for the Great Depression, and the world-wide suffering of the depression left men so fearful that some adopted fascism, with the net result the deaths of over 60 million people and the destruction of much of the developed world.
Some wish to regress a bit further. Not content with wage slavery, they yearn for real slavery to return. They want to go back before 1865 and re-litigate the Civil War, only with the South winning this time. These are the regressives that all the dog-whistle racial rhetoric are aimed at. They must be plentiful, because the dog whistle appeals to them are certainly prevalent in regressive political discourse.
And finally, we have the regressives who can’t abide in a modern society of any sort, but rather yearn for the days where they think they would be an Ebeneezer Scrooge and could lord it over the “lazy” louts such as Bob Crachit and that worthless mouth to feed, Tiny Tim. Nothing short of workhouses and rigid class structure will satisfy them, and anyone who stands in their way, they hypocritically label as conducting class warfare.
So while we have all this going on, can we remember Charles Dickens? Can we connect yet again with what he taught us about fairness and morality in social structure? Or do we have to go one more time around the wall? Do we have to relearn the lessons of history because we refuse to study history today?
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