Reagan's Legacy

I am not going to come against Reagan as a person but his politics changed America into a diferent place than it was before he became President: Reagan said that big government was bad for people but what he didn't tell you was that the government Reagan believed in was little government for people and Big Government for Corporations.


Reagan's form of Big Government for Corporations/Government racked up untold billions in debt and made Corporations King in America even as america's poor and powerless became america's serfs. Reagan's charisma moved the bulk of the American people to believe in themselves but the people in the margins were left to perish. Another of Reagan's legacies was the beginning of a vanishing middle class. I watched Corporate America fire the Upper Middle Class in Reagan's first four year and then re-hire them as lower middle class workers for contract labor, without benefits or retirement. The money in the new Government/Corporate economy was being transfered from our taxes furing Reagan's eight years from the poor & powerless to Corporations. Corporations won the position as America's darlings, while all but the wealthy lost their safety net. I voted for Reagan the first time.

Reagan's legacy continues even to this day as more and more people are bing pushed into the abyss of marginalized people. Reagan emptied the mental institutions and group homes on his watch and America's prisons came filled with people of color. More and more women and children became poor on Reagan's watch and the fathers and husbands of those women and children sit in jails and prisons, or stand on America's street-corners with signs and live in shelters.

How we treat people who can not take care of themselves is a way to measure our humanity and while I am on this earth, I want to be the type of person that is becoming more human and not less human every day. I am ashamed of the way America treats the mentally ill and disabled. I was proud to be an American when Reagan was President during his first term but now I feel embarassed at the depth of America's disrespect and lack of dignity America gives to the poorest people who live in it.

Veteran Hospitals turned away thousands of Veterans who claimed to become sick from agent orange and aalthough they were to sick to work and provide for a family, America turned our veterans out onto our street-corners. The veterans with agent orange and now veterans with sickness related to exposure to depleted uranium, massive homelessness as a result of closed mental and veteran's hospitals have all become vitim of Reagan's Vision of a Darwinian Utopia in America. Reagan's legacy is a survival of the fittest America and now America's broken people, who once lived in mental institutions, veteran homes, and group homes, now fill prisons, our nation's homeless shelters and prisons, or they live under bridges and beg for enough to buy alcohol to forget they have a family that needs them somewhere...

We are putting millions of undocumented immigrants to work and putting them on welfare when they can't live on the puny wages they receive, giving them welfare and food stamps but we forgot about the American people who might have done their jobs(maybe less efficiently)but America doesn't love them. America hates its poor and sick if they can't compete in the job market; America only wants you if you are healthy and young and willing to work long hours without benefits...As soon as you become too unhealthy or injured from working in the machine that Corporate America has become you will be discarded and tossed aside like yesterday's news. I hope you don't become mentally ill, or sick, or too tired keep up the pace in the Darwinian race to the grave that America has become... When we step on the bodies and souls of the least in our society to make us feel more tall then we have acheived Reagan's vision for America but somehow Reagan's vision for America makes me feel small.
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