(Ricky Scott--he's a big fat liar, and VERY rich thanks to the scam of the health insurance industry)Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, attending both private and public schools in high school and college and graduating with a BFA, I was never once taught the true meaning and variety of socialism--even in PolySci classes. Sure, somewhere around 10th grade my history teacher, Mr. Witucki--a nice, monotonous teacher, glazed over it briefly in about one sentence…wait, I don’t think he even did that. Then Mr. Jones(?), who was primarily the baseball coach, didn’t teach us the definition ether. Later in my college years I took a few different history classes and there again socialism wasn’t even mention except to say “they” were socialists and that we feared they would take over the world. The only people who really understood it were philosphy majors, political science majors, and some english majors.
I learned about socialism from self-study. I learned that socialism isn’t the label I heard from family and neighbors growing up. I learned there are about as many different versions of socialism as there are American apples. Some forms have mean dictators; some have constitutions based on the same principles found in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Some were based on religious principals found in the bible and other religious texts (like many born in America, the early Mormons for example had a their version), and some were a threat to American industry. I learned socialist models of health care, environmental policies, and other tools, can be used in a democracy to great effectiveness.
I learned that our government conned the American people into killing millions of innocent people in Vietnam with the tool of fear by saying that communism would spread like a virus if we didn’t stop it with force. Later we found it was just an excuse. Plenty of government officials and documents reveal our real desire was for Vietnam’s natural resources. If the people chose Ho Chi Minh as their leader (which they did) then our big businesses could not extract the rubber, tin, teak, petroleum, and rice that Vietnam was endowed with. It was this choice, the desire of the Vietnamese people for Ho Chi Minh, that kept them from loosing the war—the people stood up, and they won. And we killed or maimed millions of there women, children, and men trying to break their solidarity. Socialism was the cover-up—and still is.
I also learned why my generation and older generations can’t see past the word “socialism” in context of American policy making.
Those earlier generations were taught about socialism via American propaganda films (there are plenty for your view pleasure on YouTube). They were taught that socialists were godless killers ready to take over the world like a swarm of ants. Those earlier generations were subject to years of political thought training and American “patriotism”. They passed the same ideology onto their children and succeeded at numbing everyone to any political ideas outside of their pretended republic for which they consume.
And we are still subject to the same old propaganda. Recently the crook Richard "Rick" L Scott (and he is a crook, in the 90’s he masterminded tens of millions of dollars of fraudulent billing in 7 states) has launched a huge campaign on TV defaming Obama’s health care plan. The ads are obviously not avoiding the same old socialist arguments as we have heard for decades. And Scott has millions of viewers trained by years of propaganda and captivated by the break between their important episodes of Family Guy and Crime Scene Busters—or whatever it’s called. America is just ready to believe.
This ignorance keeps progress at bay. It keeps things like single payer health care from even being talked about on serious level. It keeps oligarchs in power of American "capitalism" and renders the people in the US easily confused about nationalism and patriotism. It keeps Federal lands from desreved protection, and churches as the ineffective crutch making up for the lack in America's oligarchical brand of capitalism. It keeps hard working lower classes and their families poor, hungry, uneducated, dying from lack of basic health care, nutrition, and crime.
It keeps crooks like Rick Scott making hundreds of millions a year.
