Betsy's Boat

I rode my bike to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy yesterday, and it left me feeling rather good about myself. I felt good that I didn’t waste gas. I felt good that I bought from an independent pharmacy, even though I spent a few more dollars than I would have if I had given my business to Walmart. And I helped in some small way to keep the local downtown alive amid the onslaught of corporate chains that crowd around the highway offramp. I try as much as possible to have my actions correspond with my values. It is a battle I fight in a thousand ways, making small decisions and sacrifices that I believe will be beneficial to my fellow man and the environment that sustains life on Earth.

And then I thought of Betsy DeVos and her $40 million yacht. I can’t imagine her worrying about the fuel such a behemoth wastes, nor all the people who pay the costs to have it wasted by her. And there is no doubt in my mind she has never scrupled to do the right thing if it cost her a dime more.

No one with any capacity for honesty can say Betsy DeVos cares about children or education. The time she will spend in government is strictly a business opportunity for her. She will leave her position in government richer than when she entered, and society will be the poorer for it. She will spend her time in government fighting for the special interests of herself, her friends, and her class. She is a taker, not a giver. Anyone with a 40 million dollar boat is a taker, it’s that simple. 40 million dollars could pay for a hell of a lot of school supplies.

Yet Betsy DeVos is the kind of person our society is set up to serve. We have a media that sweeps away all the unpleasantness that results from the actions of such individuals. It holds them up as role models to the average citizen. Our corporations are set up to funnel the wealth they create to an elite few who had enough money to invest large sums of money to begin with. Governments from the local to the federal level have been bought and constructed to conform to the whims of such people. We have built a society that exists to support sociopaths.

This may anger many who have until this point agreed with me, but it doesn’t matter whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who is in office: sociopaths will be served. Betsy Devos did not become a dangerous sociopath with the election of Trump, nor was she stripped of her obscene wealth and undue influence when Barack Obama was elected. The Democrats are merely better at disguising their supplication to sociopaths: they are more likely to allow an African American or a woman act as their servant.

They are sociopaths, let us not fall to the false politeness insisted upon by the media that is owned by and serves their kind. They are sociopaths and they have been doing a very good job of convincing the rest of us that sociopathic values are normal. They have normalized greed and selfishness, turning them into supposed virtues rather than the sins and character flaws that any healthy culture would view them as.

This is a profoundly sick society set up and run by sociopaths incapable of seeing past their own selfish interests. How can you tell who they are? Well, a 40 million dollar yacht is a big red flag. Anyone with more than one yacht or a private island is likely one of them. Anyone buying up a sizeable chunk of Hawaii or any other state because they believe it to be their just reward for their contribution to society is another tell. 

The degree to which they feel the need to place themselves above and apart from the average person is a good gauge of what they think of their fellow humans. They are the ones who have amassed obscene amounts of wealth by serving the machine. They have names like Zuckerburg, Bezos, DeVos.

They are really little different than the sociopaths of profoundly sick societies of the past: give them powdered wigs and snuff and you could mistake them for the royalty of the French Revolution. Their chief differences from those who lost their heads to the guillotine are that bloodlines are de-emphasized somewhat and they are more active in their quest for personal wealth. But their indifference to the suffering of others, their contribution to moral decline, and their unquestioned subservience to the power structure in order to advance their own interests are identical.

A society cannot long function in this manner. It can’t. Corruption always exists in any society, but too great a degree of it is deadly, just as too much rot on a tree or cancer in a human is deadly. A society needs leaders who have values that to some degree line up with the average person’s. We are almost completely lacking in such leaders. Those who are now in charge serve the values of the powerful, and the average individual is powerless.

I am not suggesting bringing out the guillotine, as they did during the French Revolution. Nor do I say we need re-education camps for the Betsy DeVos’s of the world, as was done during the Vietnam Revolution. What I am saying is we need to have a very serious discussion about how we can keep such obvious sociopaths away from the levers of power before they destroy the very planet we need for our survival. We need to keep them from defining the way we see ourselves and our relationships with each other and our planet, because the narrative they set forth is growing increasingly distant from reality. I would say the narrative pushed by the sociopathic power structure is currently the single greatest threat to our species 

Such a conversation will need to take place outside the parameters that have been set for us. We will need to include everyone from both sides of the political aisle. This conversation will need to take place outside of the mainstream media and outside of our conventional political settings, because they have been set up to create divisions among us. Raychell Maddow and Sean Hannity will never lead us towards a consensus. The media and the political process is owned by the sociopaths and will not permit sane and healthy discussion. The internet and social media have been powerful tools in permitting us such conversations, but the sociopaths have become aware of this and are looking to silence opposing voices. We must continue to find new avenues of open and honest. discussion. Not yelling, discussing. We must remember that when we speak in anger that it is an anger fomented by those who wish to keep us from finding common purpose.

We must find ways to communicate and find common purpose outside of the parameters set by the sociopaths and those who serve them. If we don’t find practical and humane ways of doing so, and doing it soon, then the Robespierres of the world will have their say. As tempting as their leadership may appeal to some, it will not lead to a better tomorrow.