As part of his campaign platform, Ralph Nader is proposing we abolish the income tax for incomes below $100K a year. In its place he’d implement a “wealth tax.” This is played up as a bid for conservative voters, and I can see how Steve Forbes might like the idea.
But this strikes me as a more radical, Jubilee-like program of social justice. My family’s disposable income could as much as double under this plan. I’d guess that most working poor families would become working middle class families.
I’m not voting for Ralph Nader (again), but this sounds like an idea I could get behind.
The following exchange was just told to me by an old friend. Susan is a preschool teacher.
Child: Susan, why did they kill Jesus?
Susan: I don’t understand. He was a nice guy, and he comes by my house sometimes.
Nice, as you know, is what little girls are expected to be and what little boys are told to be but not expected to become. But nice is also a luxury of the powers-that-be, who expect gratitude for it from the great herds of humanity, who must always prove their commitment to the will to nice or be hunted down as dangers to the order.
Nietzsche taught that nice is the cardinal sin of Christianity. Founded on ressentiment of the mighty, the will to nice seeks an end around might by making deference into a virtue with its, “No, but I insist.” Nice, as Nietzsche’s controlling aunts taught him, is always a grab for power, a feint of weakness followed by a stab in the kidney.
Unlike being nice, being polite (or politic) is a good habit, an expedient habit. Being politic communicates respect. But being nice demonstrates its perverse superiority by killing them with kindness.
From Raimond Gaita’s A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (150):
Optimism and pessimism are, anyhow, relatively trivial dispositions of personality. One can be a pessimist in the sense that one is disposed to take a gloomy view of prospects in most situations, seeing in them more reason to predict ill than good, and one can combine this with a temperamental melancholia, yet respond joyously to life as a gift.
(Read other responses to this month’s Coffee Hour topic.) No doubt you’ve heard the old joke. What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian Universalist? Answer: A knock at the door for no reason.
It ain’t easy saying what you are when what you are is a Unitarian Univeralist. No one knows what it is. And the name don’t help. If I take the time to say the whole name—U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sa-list—people do seem to be less afraid that we’re some sort of fruity fringe group (even as they pity me for being out of breath). If I mention Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the next (winded) breath, they seem more at ease, if still confused.
UUs need a new name. Like Will Shetterly said, “UU” speaks of merger in a way not dissimilar to AOL-TimeWarner? It’s true. Back in the late 1960s, the Unitarians and the Univeralists—two heretical sects of the Protestant left—merged into one organization (as all good ecumenists were wont to do back then).
But the name doesn’t really, I don’t know, communicate. But absent a winning moniker, I’ll restrain myself to shotgun commentary on some of the suggested options and on what a winning name should or shouldn’t do. Click to continue reading “Unitarian Universa-what?”
“But Jesus loves it when you smile. You wouldn’t want to make Baby Jesus sad, would you?”
