From a Google Image Search - CNN.com
I went to have a CT scan this morning (Tuesday, 1.3.2023) and on my way out of the medical center I shared the elevator with a young mom with a very calm, alert, and observant baby in an infant carrier. The mom was complaining to me about liberal pansies, spoiled GenZers, and teachers who are grooming transgender children. She had an eastern European accent, possibly someone from Ukraine, although our conversation did not last long enough to find out. I mentioned, a bit apologetically that I was a liberal pansy and that I really did not believe that teachers were grooming children to be transgender. She said, going back to the not- quite-up-to- snuff GenZers that I most likely had a strong work ethic and I explained that I am retired but that I still write. She said that she used to be a teacher and I said that I had been a teacher too but that I taught adults. She was excellent at moving the conversation away from controversial topics.
I had surmised after listening to several Long Island voters being interviewed about George Santos and listening to exit interviews of election deniers after the 2022 election, that many refugees are quite conservative and that they tend to vote for Republicans. This young woman obviously listened to right-wing media, probably Fox News because of her comments about transgender culture memes, but many refugees and newly naturalized citizens say they vote for Republicans because of their economics, and when probed most liked the idea that Republicans might offer up more tax cuts. Perhaps they are in higher tax brackets than many other Americans as most tax cuts coming from Republicans have favored high earners. Arguments that favor child tax credits for citizens in low tax brackets are coming from Democrats.
She also told me that she was going to New York City that day, a 5–6-hour drive and that her husband would be driving. Then she bemoaned America’s lack of “bullet trains” and we were finally standing on the same ground. I also bemoan our lack of bullet trains. She had been on bullet trains when visiting China. After my astonishment that this young woman had traveled so far and had experienced so much already our surprisingly interesting conversation ended because my car was further away in the parking lot.
After we parted company, I began to go over in my head the reasons America did not have bullet trains. Many of our largest corporations had gone into Asia when China opened its doors to capitalism, apparently realizing that this would provide Chinese citizens with prosperity and that China could become more powerful on the world stage (although perhaps not quite as powerful as China is becoming). This ended up robbing America of the tax dollars that might have been invested in infrastructure. This ended up robbing America of bullet trains. In a sense the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was obscene because it made the rich richer and robbed the treasury of more tax dollars, but in a way the bill merely recognized the fact that rich folks already had found ways to shelter profits and to cut their own taxes.
America’s infrastructure lags because many of the richest Americans do not feel obligated to give back a percentage of their massive profits to rebuild America. This reflects the anger of the Tea Party movement in the US when wealthy people decided that their tax dollars paid into the US treasury were being doled out to deadbeats, people who did not work. In fact, just today I was reading an article whose author contends that 10 million American men have dropped out of the work force for a variety of reasons and the contentions are supported by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492849471/an-economic-mystery-why-are-men-leaving-the-workforce
Perhaps one way to look at this situation is to conclude that China stole our bullet trains. But moving industry to China, while it ended grinding poverty for many Chinese people stole more from America than our bullet trains. Doing business in a democracy is quite different from doing business in a dictatorship. Corporate owners and managers found it frustrating to deal with unions which kept asking for a bigger share of profits with each strike or new contract negotiation, although the corporation could have chosen to offer periodic satisfactory raises to workers. Workers in an authoritarian country cannot organize into unions, and while they may get raises, these are set by the country’s leader and, for the most part, are non-negotiable. Our corporations found themselves with a work force that bore some resemblances to slave labor, although with key differences.
I have argued that the Great Factory Migration occurred when the USSR became Russia, when a number of member states became independent, when Mao died and China opened its doors to capitalism. I have also argued that globalism was inevitable. Now that China has not only become a more prosperous state but seems to have taken a more aggressive military stance (don’t touch my stuff and that is all my stuff) we may begin to question the wisdom of spreading the wealth.
Today’s (1.5.2023) Washington Post has an excellent article on this dynamic:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/05/biden-foreign-policy-china-russia-free-trade/
Sometimes it seems that it might be great if we got beyond national boundaries as we once got beyond monarchies, but now perhaps we need to figure out how to do without dictators first.
N.B. -- I did a bit of reading about bullet trains and there are bullet trains that are just very fast trains and there are maglev bullet trains, and then there is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop where you get sealed in a capsule (a comfortable capsule) and shot through a tunnel like a message in a pneumatic tube in a 50’s department store.
It is probably obvious that China, in its current iteration is freaking me out. Many fiction writers can foresee a future when China might take over America. While the Chinese people have never had a tradition of democratic rule, Americans have and that might be why we terrorize ourselves with visions of our lives under the thumb of a dictator.
When Hu Jintao, the former leader of China was led out of a recent Party Congress so reluctantly and then died soon after it only fed my fears of living in an authoritarian state.
Still, I do not wish any ill will to befall the people of China. They have shown us that they are not totally submissive, programmed to accept anything the leader orders to stay safe. Defying the covid lockdown was quite brave and perhaps the people would similarly defy being turned into a clone army. If China’s greatest strength is the size of its population and it decides to turn that advantage against us, then we could be in a horrific war for decades. Rather than choose a dying Russia as a partner because of proximity, or a not-quite-sane North Korea, or an Iran bogged down in religious fervor China should join the West in fighting climate change, thus giving us a positive focus and making our goals to save the planet more attainable. China is an enormous nation and is in the middle of complex changes. There is much more to say on this subject. China is on my reading list.