The Making of a Born-Again Socialist
Dear US Representative Lloyd, Doggett,
Corporate America is organized sociopathy.
I have had this opinion since I was in my early twenties and have been writing about it for the last twelve years. After seeing Michael Moore’s "Capitalism: A love affair", my mind was tipped completely over to a commitment to do whatever I legally can to change our economic and political system. I use the word system because corporations and the government are only parts of many other aspects of our culture that are integrally related and that mutually facilitate each other.
There are many parts within this system. We have a non-democratic, representative form of government that favors the wealthy. We have a vertical and horizontally monopolized media that is subservient to corporations. We have an educational system that militates against learning to think and prevents learning of maturity and humane values. Our sports and recreational organizations promote a culture of violence and encourage tactics for breaking the rules and learning how to avoid detection. Our authoritarian military that promotes a biased view of US involvement with falsely demonized foreign nations and brainwashes soldiers into having an impersonal perception of fellow human beings whom we designate as our current enemies. Our justice system is designed to promote the interests of the wealthy. Our biological sciences promote a myth of the genetic superiority of the rich and defective genetics as the cause of poverty. Our religious institutions promote a belief in the nineteenth century Protestant ethic that favors the wealthy. Our medical and pharmaceutical scientists promote the use of medications to mollify the emotional and physical ills that are caused by our diseased culture, especially our economic and political systems. Our authors perpetuate myths about the early history of the creation of the United States, especially the genocide of the American Indian, and minimize the unconscionable and inhumane practice of slavery, especially the dependence of our early presidents on slavery, and the rest of our ignominious our history since those early times. The writings of most of our authors, whether unwittingly or not, defend our pro-elite society, typically in ways undiscernibly by the populace. They frame debates over and information about our relations with the rest of the world to cast us in the best possible light at the unjust expense of benign foreign nations.
Our culture measures its success by using such indicators as Gross National Product and the percentage of growth; factors which serve to perpetuate the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of the global environment. Our diseased culture has us on a monomaniacal course demanding this kind of growth and the consequences of inevitable, eventual destruction of the earth and humankind. This is only a partial list of the ills of our systems.
For reasons such as these, I am joining the Socialist Party. I am not abandoning you, Representative Doggett, as I know you have striven all of your political life to curtail the ills of our society and to benefit your constituents. Yet, we who think all know that corporate America is organized, legally authorized, sociopathy. Therefore, there is a desperate, eleventh-hour, need for a paradigm shift. I now know that I must join and support the Socialist Party. I hope that you and my readers will do so as well.