This I Believe

This appeared on someone's Facebook page. I've been trying really hard to stay out of the FB political fray, since I'm so easily baited. But this one I can't let pass.

I believe that shared prosperity has paved our roads, built our bridges, put us on the moon, educates our children, educated us, built our interstate highway system, prevents old people from freezing to death in the winter, provides medical and psychiatric care for our veterans, keeps children from dying of starvation, and puts a roof over the heads of those who are disabled and can no longer work. I believe it protects our country from being attacked, puts out fires, comes to the aid of accident victims, keeps our homes and our places of work safe, and puts books in libraries where everyone has access to them. I believe it ensures clean water, has installed sewer systems so we no longer have to fling human waste into the streets, built the infrastructure for electricity to be delivered to our homes, has saved the most beautiful of our wild spaces for public use, and comes to our aid in times of natural disasters.

I believe continued shared prosperity is crucial for the future of our country -- and that means everyone sharing their fair share.

If you want to call me a communist for that, that is your prerogative.

But unless you went to a private school on private roads that crossed waterways and other roads on privately built and maintained bridges, and never received a vaccination at school and never participated in a public high school sport where the uniforms and the coaches and the transportation and officials were paid for by taxpayers and never have needed to use nor expect to need to use Medicare or Medicaid and have never flown on a commercial airline and thus needed to go through airport security and can put out your own house fires and have your own private security firm that will protect your house and will never need the court system to prosecute someone who did you or a family member harm and will never need to call 911 for help, then I believe you need to take back your name calling.

Pooling our resources to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of all the citizens of this nation does not make us communists, or even socialists. It makes us a society: a collection of people who have come together for the common good. This is how we have survived as a species. It is how we have prospered as a country. It is a system by which each and every American has benefited.

Shared prosperity built this nation.And calling it communism and tearing it down will only tear down this nation.

This I believe.