Capitol change

As I have stated before, I like to torture myself often. Part of me torturing myself includes watching Glenn Beck every day at 5 p.m. on Fox News.

For the most part, I think the guy is a raging lunatic. Normally what he says gets no response out of me. But last Thursday, his show prompted me to respond.

On a segment of his show called “Refounding America,” he accused President Obama and others associated with him and his administration of being revolutionaries who are trying to stamp out free speech, grow our government into either a communist or socialist government and bring an end to the free market as we know it. He went on to make comparisons between the founding father “revolutionaries” and the modern “revolutionaries,” saying that the founding fathers had the interest of all in mind and that today’s “revolutionaries” only have special interests in mind.

Again, Glenn Beck’s rants usually doesn’t provoke a response from me, but this one did. Ever since the Lehman Brothers collapsed last summer, we have turned on the television and read newspapers to hear story after story of corporate corruption, million-dollar scams and people legally being screwed out of savings and homes that they have earned by working hard for years. All of these things have occurred under a capitalist society. I will not say that it is a true free market society, but it is a capitalist society.

One can sit back and blame all of this on the deregulation of the Bush administration or blame it on special interests or say that what Obama is doing with all the efforts to control or regulate the market is worse than what we had before. For the sake of this article I don’t really care where you rest. But I do care if you have a mind that is capable of thinking outside of the box that we have been trained to think in since elementary school. Because if you can, I challenge all of you to think of something more.

I do not believe that Obama is trying to destroy capitalism or the free market, as Glenn Beck suggests. I firmly believe he is trying to preserve the market as it has been. He is trying to heal the market. My issue is that maybe that is the problem. Whether the market is regulated or deregulated, the disenfranchised continue to be ignored.

Speaking of the Declaration of Independence, if we have inalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” shouldn’t the pursuit of happiness be a pursuit of all and not just of individuals? Should it not be a society where all have an EQUAL chance to obtain equality? I understand and agree to some extent with the laissez-faire idea that inequality of some sort promotes competition, which is good.

But the market of today has made it useless for millions to begin the pursuit to better themselves because not only will they not achieve their American dream, they barely make it out of their American nightmare. Whatever you think of capitalism, free market, socialism or laissez-faire, we need an economy where everyone has a chance to crash and burn, not just burn.