It Has To Hurt
– by David Matthews 2
Here’s a little message from one former card-carrying member of the GOP: if you’re going to hurt people, you have to own the pain.
The parent that tries to rationalize that punishing their child “hurts me more than it hurts you” is lying, especially when corporeal punishment is being used. Causing pain to a child, either through physical contact or chemical attack (i.e. hot sauce), is far more traumatic to your child than your “perceived” pain as a parent. The parent is not physically flogging himself or herself after beating the child. They’re not scalding their own tongues after engaging in chemical punishment. They know the child is going to cry, even if they’re not being maimed and scarred for life. Only a real sadist - and an unfit parent - will then demand that the child not cry or show any emotion to being punished. You may not like to hear the child cry out in pain, but that’s the only way you know that the punishment is supposedly working.
This is something that the GOP apparently does not understand.
These self-professed champions of austerity seem to think that budget cuts should be painless, endured with a sense of silent misery and quiet desperation normally reserved for depressed people, abuse victims, and sufferers of (insert illness of the day here). They carry on with an odorously pompous self-serving attitude that we all should just sit the “bleep” down and shut the “bleep” up and just take our medicine and ask for more. I would normally follow through with the old saying about how we all should just lay back and like it, in reference to a certain non-consensual act, but the GOP has also taken it upon themselves of late to haggle over whether that particular act is “legitimate” or not.
Understand that those within the GOP live in a world detached from the rest of us. And that detachment is nothing new.
Much like the nobles in France, they have effectively zoned themselves away from the “peasants”, and they surround themselves with like-minded people. French nobles didn’t connect or interact with “peasants”. They were just abstract ideas as far as the French nobles were concerned. “Peasants” weren’t “people” in the minds of the French nobles; they were just filthy animals that should be thankful they have a purpose in “their world”.
In the case of our modern-day French Noblesse, the GOP surround themselves with big corporate minds and big money bankers and big money lobbyists and well-financed economic think-tanks. These are all groups that reduce the state of humanity to simple numbers on a spreadsheet. They don’t see you as a human being, but rather as a series of identification numbers on a piece of paper or on a monitor screen. That’s all that we are to them. We’re not people; just digits. You know, like Mitt Romney’s infamous “forty-seven percent”.
So when the GOP goes over the budget, they don’t see human beings in the various programs. They just see numbers. They see that “X”-amount of money is going to an account ID. They don’t know - and they probably don’t want to know either - that the account ID is actually a mother with three kids struggling to make ends meet. They just see numbers and amounts and they make a judgment call about what they think those numbers should really be, just like all their friends in Wall Street and the banking industry and Big Corporate see. No human beings; just digits.
That probably explains why the GOP has this virtually sick, sadistic, sociopathic attitude when it comes to budget cuts. They don’t see these cuts affecting human beings. They just see numbers.
This probably also explains why the GOP are taken back when people make a big deal about those cuts. Their conservative proxies are sending out editorials asking what the big deal is over the dreaded budget sequestration. Why are their party benefactors picking fights over who came up with the idea? It’s what they wanted anyway, right?
They even go so far as to threaten President Obama to supposedly not politicize the jobs that would have to be furloughed because of sequestration. It’s a little too late for that, don’t you think? It’s like sending the police to foreclose on a family’s home, kicking everyone to the curb and having their belonging thrown out on the lawn, and then showing up to hand them all surveys to fill out and then asking them to be objective… and honestly expecting them to!
Let’s get brutally honest here, GOP… budget cuts are supposed to hurt! They are supposed to be painful!
You are interrupting plans, destroying projects, ruining careers, shattering dreams, sending people into economic tailspins, and otherwise making life miserable for literally millions of people across the country with your actions. If you honestly expect those people to simply wince at all that and say “Thank you sir may I have another” like Kevin Bacon in “National Lampoon’s Animal House”, then you need serious professional help, not to mention be removed from any kind of decision-making process that involves human beings.
So the White House ends their tours. So air traffic controllers get thinned out. So federal inspectors and regulators can’t do their jobs as well. Aren’t these things that you were looking to do anyway with all of your pseudo-Reagan rhetoric about a bloated government?
Speaking of which, I’m just curious… how many of your staff members will be taking furloughs? How much are your own offices sacrificing? You expect us to weather these losses without complaint, so maybe you should take it upon yourself to show that it really is “hurting you more than it is hurting us”, as the old corporal punishment lie goes.
Besides, we all know it could be worse. You think people are complaining here about budget cuts? It’s nothing compared to how people are complaining about cuts in Europe! You can still ride your cushy limousines from your cushy homes all the way to your cushy marble Congressional offices and not worry about protesters shutting off the streets or rioters destroying the Washington Mall. It wasn’t always like that, you know.
So stop complaining about people complaining about the forced budget sequestration and all of the cuts that are being done because of it. Be thankful that those “ungrateful peasants” are not acting like their French counterparts of two centuries ago… where such “Let them eat cake” mentalities resulted in the literal loss of one’s head. Now those are cuts that really hurt!
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