In the second half of today’s episode, we try to determine how both political parties are supposed to work together to make the country work as well as it can.
Keep on riding, would have says, we continue to broadcast the balance and defend the discourse from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. Welcome back to Civic Cipher. I'm your host, rams'.
Jah, this is this is cute, y'all. But I wow man, yeah, yeah, we're here, man, yeah, man, we were here.
But stick around because we are going to be talking about, you know, in the interest of trying to make sense of you know, I still believe that human beings are generally decent, if not given it fear and you know it can be convinced to do bad things. We're going to explore how the two parties in this country make the country better both parties do. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna try to have that conversation good luck. I mean, it's a tough time to do it, but we're going to attempt to do so. So please stick around for that and much more. But right now we're going to discussed Baba becoming a better ally Baba and Today's Baba sponsored by Friends of the Movement. You can sign up for the free voter wallet from fotmglobal dot com to support black businesses and allied businesses as well as make an impact with your spending. Again, that's Fotmglobal dot Com. I'm gonna share a letter that we received just kind of trying to encourage us. This is from a listener. His name is Pat and I thought this was I was moved by it, and you know, we need to be better allies now more than ever. So it says, Brother Ramsays and Brother Q, I listened to your November ninth show this morning on my way to work, and it broke my heart. I'm filled with sadness for our efforts to make the election outcome be different, and certainly I have concern for what these next four years will bring. But this year, my family and I threw it all in for Kamala as well as an important representative for the good in Virginia, Missy Carter, Smassi Smuscle. I believe for my second district, we gave personally significant money, many days walking neighborhoods with our boys, knocking doors and working the polls, and maybe this outcome, like watching our brother George Floyd having his life squeezed out of him on livestream, will serve as an opportunity for awakening. We need to be aware, awake, and so many of my white brothers and sisters woke for a bit after the George Floyd murder, only for so many people to be caught in the BS culture wars and fear and propaganda to eventually go back to our comfy living rooms and wonder if isolationism is the right way to go right now. And you two beautiful, gifted, committed and in action brothers, have even less to regret than I do. Your show has grown and grown and grown. Hearing Attorney, General Holder and Secretary Rice back to back daily shows followed by Kamma's brother in law and sister Powerful. You guys are crushing it. You guys are making profound difference, in my honest opinion, the progress you and I are out to see everywhere. It's continuing the so sis and bear fruit at the same time. Nothing but love and respect. Pat. We appreciate you, Pat, thank you for the letter. We do need that love and that vot of confidence these days, you know, and we're going to try to keep you encouraged as well. So onward, all right, So I came across a question that I thought was worth pondering. You know, Republicans think that they must save America from liberalism and its policies. So what is it that they think that they're saving America from? Now? I know, I know, I'm doing my best to try to approach this. For a person like me, it's really easy to laugh because it's like, I know that their fears are unfounded. I know that, but I'm going to try to view it as though their fears are valid. And if their fears are valid, then perhaps I can speak to them. And if I can speak to them, or I can find a way to speak to those fears, then maybe I can empower our listeners to maybe have similar conversations. You know, this country changes in you know, at the dinner table. That's where it starts. You know, if anybody's going to get pulled one way or the other, it's going to be over dinner. It's going to be in the living room. It's going to be at the around the water cooler at work, It's going to be in places like that. There's a quote that Bill Clinton made a long time ago that is I'm like rolling it around in my head. He says. The quote. It says, the left is at its best, The left at its best tears down walls that shouldn't have been there, and the right at its best stops the left from tearing down walls that should be there. And if I boil my understanding of the two party system in this country down to its essence, I think that that is a masterful way of explaining what each party stands for, what they're trying to do. There are people who again are like kind of like me. Everybody is inherently kind, everybody deserves a shot, everyone deserves equitable access to X, Y and Z, and we need to find the capacity to bring all these things into manifestation. And then on the right, they ask how, they ask why, they try to compare apples to apples, and oftentimes we're not dealing with apples and more apples, and there's a more realistic look, less optimistic look at things when folks on the right have a critical examination of what folks on the left want to do. And so again Bill Clinton's statement about and I think it's important to emphasize the left at its best tears down walls that shouldn't be there, and the right at its best keeps the left from tearing down walls that should remain. That at its best part is really what we're speaking to because there's I think that a lot of the stories that you've shared on the on the show c about growing up in Michigan with your mom having friends that voted differently from her, but they were friends. I think the ideas in those stories and the people represent the left at its best, the right at its best. What I've also found is that it's easier for cancerous, toxic, fear based facets, forms of thought, schools of thought to exist under the right than it is under the left. That's not to say that it doesn't exist under the left too, but it's it's it's easier for those things to exist and to breed under the right because the right is it's literally conservative, you know, the slower to move, slower to accommodate and account for, less likely to share, makes decisions more based around fear than what is morally just. It's more based around what's possible, not what is ideal. You know, what can we do, not what should we do or what can we avoid doing? And so I think that that's why in recent years we've seen more of that, But I don't and we've done a good job. I think so far on this show to try to delineate let's call them the Maga extremists from you know, your typical conservative folks who cannot conceive of voting for a liberal candidate, and so they're stuck with casting a vote alongside the Maga people, the clans people, the people that we talked about in the first half of the show that increase in hate speech toward women, they've historically been able to excuse use well, you know, this is the party that kind of shields all of the racist people. But I'm not racist. They just you know, I'm a fiscal conservative. But I mean they can excuse the fact that they're voting alongside those other folks. And I think this is why we have to go to such great links to delineate the decent folks who are Republican and conservative in their feelings from the rest, because they have to excuse so much in order to remain in lock locked what is it lockstep, or to remain under that same umbrella. Right. So again, this is something that I need to learn about. And I know that you have more to offer this conversation than I do, because you're the one that actually grew up with seeing that you know in Michigan.
I honestly think that I might be the worst possible person to try to gain some understanding from in a conversation like this one, because, even in good faith, right talking about both sides at their best, the ideas in and of themselves that one party is trying to take down fences while the other wants to build them, even if that's the only even if that's all the information that we have, it's the difference between inclusivity and exclusivity, and the arguments that could be made for the necessity of both. We can't give all of our food away because we won't eat. We can't give all of our jobs away because we won't eat. But the exacerbation of that train of thought leads to we can't give anything away. All of this is mine, none of this is yours. And in the conversations of right and wrong, the extremes of those two are not equal. The person that would hoard everything for themselves and watch everyone else perish is not as decent a person as the one that would do the opposite.
On the opposite end, you have your Jesus and your mother Teresa's and your Gandhi's you understand what I'm saying.
So, even using good faith with both at their best, the ideals are not the same. They don't.
They don't.
They're not on the same level. They're not equivalencies of one another. So and then now there is no best of the right, m right. You have people like Mayor Gileska who said, I can't do that anymore. Yeah, it does not matter if I'm a fiscal Republican or I've always been a conservative in life grandfather.
No, no, no, no, no no.
This other side has as its chosen leader a blatant, flagrant, out loud rapist, racist, misogynistic, pig, authoritarian fascist. And people look these terms up because I see people using words like socialists and communists and fascist and authoritarian, and they've just determined that they're all bad words that mean the same thing. They're not. So I challenge people, when you see communist and authoritarian and fascist and socialist and look these words up, understand what they mean. And if you've determined that you're against one of those as an idea, understand your why. Years ago, Bernie Sanders ram people called him a socialist, So people said, okay, I can't vote for him. I think a very large percentage of those people think socialist is a bad word, so I can't support it. I think a very large percentage of those people, if they understood what that meant, would not have reacted the way that it makes.
It makes And he said he's a democratic socialist. Yeah, so.
So again. And we try to have these both sides conversations. They've always driven me crazy because it's an intentional fossil equivalency. Right. The idea of this democracy that we live in, in this capitalist society that we live in, requires that there be some of us that have nothing, even though we have more than enough for everyone to have something.
Can I help you make that point please? In study being capitalism. I don't want to act like I'm an expert on capitalism or economic models for societies, because I'm not. But I did go to school a little bit back in the day. I do have a master's degree in business management. You know, I'm not stupid, but my understanding of capitalism is that you need to have some unemployment all the time. You cannot.
Why would a system require that there'd be some people unemployed who are unemployed?
That's a great question. The idea if there is some unemployment is that wages can be kept lower and businesses can succeed, spurring innovation and COMPETI because competition and innovation are bedfellows.
And those are supposed to be the things that push societies forward.
Right. But the sacrifice, of course, is that there's a human cost, because again, in order for capitalism to work, you need unemployment. If everyone has a job, then no one is afraid of not having a job. And as long as you have some people that you can point to and say, hey, look see those people. They're not working, so I don't have to pay you what you're worth.
And by not working, they're not eating, and they're not housed, and they don't have clothes, and they don't have things.
It's a whole you know what I mean. And so historically in this country, the people who have borne the brunt of that has been black people and women, black women. Let me say it clearly so you understand. Find me a time in this country, in this country's history where the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate. In any event, I think that you know, I'm trying to have a good faith argu this is why when we look at the exit poll information from the last election and a lot of elections, you see where morally this country should be. By looking at how black women vote, you can see the right choice, the moral right choice by looking at how black women vote overwhelmingly. And now, of course there's millions upon millions of black women, all voting differently, not all of them, you know, because it's usually most of them voting one way, and you can very clearly see. But there are people that can say, well, this black woman didn't do that, and that black woman didn't do it, and pull out the Candice Owes and whatnot. But if you look at the data, it's very clear and there's a reason for that. Those people understand what it's like to be on the bottom. Those are the people propping up Like in the day to day, it's black women in the real world that are propping up Republican profits, Republican systems. They're holding the whole country up. And they don't vote Republican because it's not in their interest, of course. But as long as black women are at the bottom and black men just above them and the rest of the minorities in this country, then they have the stratification of a society that will work. Now, I don't necessarily want to have that conversation because again, in trying to understand and trying to have a good faith approach and gain an understanding of how both parties make this country work. There's another quote that I came across. This was just some guy's thoughts online. I'm gonna say his name, but I think it inspires some thinking. So this guy's name is Rob Bartley. He says quote or he's citing a quote here, and the quote is don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up. And that quote comes from G. K. Chesterton. So these are now Rob Bartley's words. The debate, largely between the right and the left, is over the value and the reason of the fences in place. The left dislikes fences on wages, for example, while the right dislikes fences placed on business. Both can argue the effects on the workers or the effect on jobs. Both have valid points. Either of them, left unchecked, is bad for the country. The tension between the two is honestly why we're still a great country. Our inability to enforce our ideas on the other keeps us all free from the good intentions of the other. And again, in a perfect world, that'd be great. But once this new administration gets the reins.
The privilege of ever feeling like what he just said is is insane. Forgive me for saying that so flagrantly, but the privilege of ever thinking that what he just said was true. One side of that argument needs for their own benefit, for them to be for there to be those of us that have nothing, because we're talking about these things in principle right. One side of this argument wants to put into place things that will benefit one percent of us.
That trickle down economics was a decidedly publican idea that didn't work after forty fifty years of trying, and.
It's still in place in some ways, and the tax cut for the tax cuts for the rich, and all these policies, all of this stuff that they're trying to put in. If you read through Project twenty five, if you read through whatever Agenda forty seven, the things that they have in place are there to benefit one percent of us. So you'd ask, well, how do you get fifty percent of us to vote for something that only benefits one percent of us. You tap into all of our natural greed. I one day might be a part of that one percent and fears, so I want that to benefit me when you couple that with racism and fear, xenophobia and white supremacist nationalism and on and on, because fear sometimes we use as a synonym for hate, and they're not the same things. It's not the fear of black people or immigrants, or gay people or women. It's to hate. These men don't fear women. They hate them. They don't respect them, they don't consider them human, they consider them beneath them. They don't deserve the right to vote or the right to have their own jobs. They don't deserve the right to deny a man's sex. Yeah, and these aren't ramsen Q's thoughts. Yeah, go back and listen to the first part of the show if you missed it. They've pulled off the master con of pushing forth laws, litigation, legislation to benefit the one percent at the risk of failing everyone else, and they don't care.
Well, I'm we're gonna need a round two on that one, because you know that there's there's got to be something else there, you know, I remember there was a gentleman saying that he's going to vote for Donald Trump because he protects the interests of a white future, and that's all he's interested in. You can excuse all the flaws and so forth. And he's a lifelong Republican and Donald Trump was his guy, and he doesn't consider himself racist. So there's more layers to this. Definitely, we'll have those conversations at some point in the future, but for now we will say thank you for tuning in to this episode of Civic Cipher. I've been your host rams this jah.
Yeah, I'm still cure. Thank you Pat for the letter. Yeah, man, I thank you to all of you guys that are still tuned in listening to us. It's a it's a tough mental space right now, right like that that I'm not racist, I'm not sexist people, but I still support him, so those things aren't disqualifiers.
Man. That's tough, super tough. But lock in with us on all social media and the website at Civiccipher dot com and until next week, y'all.
Peace,