Devil With the Blue Dress On

 
    When the Democratic Party abandoned its focus on what is best for everyone that is willing to contribute more than they take they subsequently tossed out traditional family values and legions of loyal believers in favor of popular social trends and what it considers politically correct; the result has been a mass exodus of staunch supporters like myself and millions more across the country that make up what is left of the American middle class.

    The new priorities of the party is a reflection of the growing division in our country between people of different ethnic backgrounds, cultures, faith and long held social norms of various communities; it has become symbolic for failure and the near collapse of morality and pride in what our nation always stood for among the vast majority of 21st Century Democrats. They have made flag burning, destroying other people's property and character assassination of anyone who doesn't hate what they hate their adopted identity over common sense and working in unison to achieve good things for all.

    What the Democrats have accomplished during their restructuring phase essentially amounts to dividing us all into groups based on the color of our skin, social economic status, sexual orientation, gender and age. I am a straight male and I am white. I am a U.S. citizen by birth and my heritage is deeply rooted in Jewish faith and I believe I share Christian values with other religions. I am not poor and I am over the age of 40.

    Others in my group  who might also be seen as past their prime and now also less valued by the Democratic Party is anyone that falls below the poverty level as well as some that are are much better off financially than most of us! Our group also is also heavily populated with females and it includes people of color and very different backgrounds; some are not physically attracted to the opposite sex but instead prefer being with same-sex partners, and collectively we all seem to have as many different visions for our futures as we do different religious beliefs!

   Nevertheless we have a common denominator in that we walked away or were deemed by them as not in step with the Democratic Party's new focus, thus no longer considered needed by the them to achieve its changing identity. In other words, they divided us, pitted us against one another and then chose sides, and when they took their eyes off us we came back to haunt them from voting booths across the land and we will again and again in future elections until they wake up and discover what is really important to everyone and not just their chosen niche groups.

    If they are unable to do that we could be witnessing the end of them and the birth of a new party that will be called something entirely different but still use the jackass as its mascot. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, until it is met by a voter that has been lied to or forgotten about. or taken advantage of.

    Among the elements of change within the ranks of Democrats is the complexion of the party itself; it is now an organization that has become a tight-knit union of politicians looking out for only themselves while making promises it knows it cannot keep to the growing number of poor people regardless of skin color that have needed to struggle their entire lives whether they are U.S. Citizens or not. They exist to fool them and other segments of society it claims as its own such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender community. By their rhetoric Democrats have demonized anyone that sees the devil in the details of what they have been offering all of those people but have failed for decades to deliver.

    Marching in parades and standing at podiums to share solidarity with various groups whether they believed in their causes or not didn't work out as well as they thought it might. They miscounted their loyal base and they underestimated the number of defectors from it while courting new voters they believed would show up for them and swell their ranks even greater, but  it didn't happen. Instead they were blindsided by reality and force-fed a new president that they despise and a congress that promises to take more away from them!

    Being switch-hitters and wearing cheap disguises when the stakes were as high as they were this time around proved fatal to Democrats' plans of reshaping America into a land of milk and honey only for them, and it is something they may not recover from within the foreseeable future. I know a few key players that admit privately why they show a second face to the public than the one I have known for years. I grew up with some of these politicians, I went to school with them and I worked alongside many of them for the same goals when I too was a loyal Democrat. That all changed about a year and a half ago when I had to come to grips with how they, not me went way left of center! I still hold with traditional Democratic values but finding other Democrats that still do is like lifting a hen's beak and believing you will see teeth.

    If any of this sounds harsh it is intended to because there are harsh realities they would prefer will never be discussed or exposed! For example: there are very few if any elected Democrats that would qualify for public assistance programs or could be considered to be barely making it. Most earn above average incomes for the work they do and they live in the finer neighborhoods; they have amazing health care benefits, good retirement programs and are usually only seen outside of their safer environments when stumping for support of something they want; whether it is to remain popular among their colleagues and constituents or because they fear not being elected or re-elected and forced to actually look for a job like everyone else that needs to earn a living.

     Don't believe it? Look at any Democratic controlled city in America and count the familiar names that keep getting elected to one office after or another or to the same one over and over. It's an easy gig once they get their names established and recognized, and usually that is all they need because once that happens the money they suck from supporters and donors flows their way like water from a spigot! But as you come to realize that the worst cities in America with the highest crime rates and most ghettos are typically under Democratic control and have been for decades it should cause you to wonder how these people keep getting elected.

     Democrats know the answer to that mystery; they recruit voters from those dirty and dangerous places with promises everyone knows they will break to clean them up. They show up in every parade where they climb into convertibles to play a rolling shell game; hiding their true agendas and then distracting everyone on both sides of the street by waving in a friendly gesture with one hand while tossing Tootsie Rolls to their children with the other and making them believe there is more candy where that came from.

    A typical example of a city where Democrats are pulling the wool over the eyes of anyone that still believes they are looking out for who the say they are is my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. I can point to and describe the community I have called home for nearly 60 years as an example of their cloak and dagger policies, and none of our elected officials (nearly all Democrats) would be eager to engage in any debate with me. If any are actually reading any of this they will pretend they didn't and won't weigh in one way or another because they cannot afford to be made to look like frauds.
 
   We used to call this part of town the south end  before the big investors moved in and ran off most of the blue collar families and replaced them with a community of mostly upper income professional people.

    The old south end was once home to a middle class that stayed here for generations but was forced to scatter when jobs disappeared, property values escalated and when the inner-city public school system became more of a watering trough for liberals and their politically correct knuckle headed ideas instead of focusing on teaching kids to learn much more than basic academic skills or how to become productive citizens when it becomes their turn to contribute to the good of others. In addition to having had a Democratic mayor for nearly two decades every seat on our city council, every seat on the board of county commissioners and our school board is and has been under Democratic control and it has been for a generation or more!

    Collectively they are responsible for every problem that has resulted from bad decisions made by reckless people who make their living in politics. Our school system has gotten by without checks and balances by misguided people that use the board as a low-diving platform into higher paying elected offices, and by some that choose to run for seats on it because they have nowhere else to go in politics for a paycheck. Ours has been racked with mismanagement mistrust and scandal for more than 40 years yet it keeps pestering voters for more and more money during almost every election.
   
    Instead of being able to boast of successes it looks for excuses for its failures and reasons to close more buildings that don't have enough students in them to make it worth anyone's tax dollars to keep them open. Columbus has grown to the fifteenth largest city in America yet the student population in our public school system doesn't reflect growth, and in fact is less than half of what it was forty years ago! The area I grew up in was once the neighborhood of hundreds of school-aged children but one could stay outside 24 hours of any given day now and never see any kids because families with more than two people have nearly all but vanished from around here.

    We never see children walking to school or waiting for a bus to take them there, and we never see young mothers or fathers loading them into mini vans or SUV's to take them. The few that do live somewhere close by attend private schools even though there are public school buildings operating within a five or ten-minute walk from their homes. The houses around here that not long ago could have been purchased for under $100,000.00 if they were pristine now go on the market for as much as three-to-ten times that amount even if they need worked on. There are no homes close by that the poor people Democrats claim to be concerned about could afford to purchase or even rent!

    The blocks that have escalated out of their reach in value have been tagged with names like Schumacher Place, Merion Village and German Village; where houses that routinely cost a half-million dollars or more line brick streets and are enjoyed by people that probably never needed to worry about making one paycheck last until the next.

    The residents close by no longer resemble the working class that was here; one would be hard-pressed to find any with jobs like meat packers, steel workers, glass makers or someone working in retail or in the service sector. There are a few, but they are greatly outnumbered by people who earn salaries high enough to afford those expensive homes and who pay servants like house-keepers and gardeners to do their domestic labors and who drive vehicles with nameplates like Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Lexus and Infinity.

    These are the people that mostly identify themselves as Democrats. During the 2016 presidential election cycle Hillary Clinton campaign signs outnumbered Donald Trump yard signs a thousand or more to one! It was the same for Democratic candidates running for office on the state and local level as well and it has been this way for the past twenty years! When this was a blue-collar area there was an even number of Republicans and Democrats living here but that ratio no longer exist and the few Republicans that are still around keep quiet about their political leanings for fear of being labeled unfairly by their neighbors as being sexist or supporting racism, homophobia and every other bad title they can think of.

    Those Democrats that claim to care about people that are not white are mostly white people that have no interest in moving to other neighborhoods close by where poorer minorities are forced to live. They invest nothing but talk in those communities where homes are worth under fifty thousand if they don't have a few windows covered with plywood or aren't decorated with gang inspired graffiti.

    They claim to care about the trash strewn alleys and streets where children walk to school past drug dealers and prostitutes and they go to their community festivals each summer and fall to deliver political speeches that promise help is on the way but they leave the ghetto as they found it and concentrate instead on making those little islands called Schumacher Place, Merion Village and German Village prettier and safer for the people that have the means to help their nearby neighbors but don't.

    The mostly hand-picked Democrats that hold nearly every important office here are made up of people they all claim to care about and they are black folks, white folks, men and women, gay and lesbian and they are getting younger and younger with each new election. But what few can claim to be (if any) is someone that truly puts others needs above their party or even on the same level playing field.

     They are too busy to really care about people in general, they bed down with special interest groups and they build properties the middle class will never be able to afford and then they buy them for investment purposes. But what is worse than that is they give tax-breaks to their friends that build them while gouging everyone else to make up for revenue loss.

     Their investments are returned to them in the form of campaign contributions and higher salaries they vote for themselves. They don't create the jobs they promise and they offer no incentives for struggling families to want to stay where they are. Instead they create chaos in neglected communities so more people will want to leave and free-up more bargain properties they can buy and sell to people that can make them attractive and more expensive to expand the boundaries for them to invest in and profit from.

    They pretend to be interested in lower income areas by cleaning out community watering holes like public swimming pools or turning on fire-hydrants for poor kids to run through on hot summer days. They build cheap little recreation centers or make cosmetic improvements to dilapidated or closed ones for children to go to for structured play-time, and they turn vacant lots where houses that weren't worth saving have been torn down and put a few basketball nets and call it a park.
 
    Those parks don't have a sliding-board or a swing-set because  they aren't really parks when compared to the wealthy Democrat's majestic Schiller Park in German Village (also a stone's throw from nearby Schumacher Place and Merion Village)  where there are numerous tennis courts, an outdoor music and arts facility, a huge indoor recreation center, a grand lake, lots of lighting, a running track, tall trees and beautiful gardens that are meticulously kept along with plenty of open space for their dogs to run freely while they sit at picnic tables and gossip about the crime that lives just a few blocks away.

    The people that comprise the neighborhood associations are people I know, they are my neighbors and they talk to me about gala's they host to raise funds to keep their park and streets clean and safe and they include some who hold public office, professors and some who work in radio, television and print media. Many are attorney's, doctors, engineers, business managers and even CEO's of large companies and a few ease their consciences with philanthropic endeavors that show they care but are able to easily reel their gifts back in through tax write-offs for themselves or by being awarded contracts by their friends to build new things.

    What most have in common is no small measure of arrogance and belonging to or only supporting the Democratic Party. Not the one I was raised to believe in and place my trust with, but a new one whose demographics and complexion is different than what it ever was before. It has become a party that has hung out the welcome sign for new voters that are younger and have less to contribute than my generation and those before mine have. When they see us we peering into their new storefront window they turn that sign around and shut off the lights hoping we will not join the opposition party but just go away instead.

    They do this because they know we aren't as easily fooled as their new congregation and because we aren't shy about voicing our opinions or questioning there motives. Anytime there is an organized rally somewhere to protest the purging of so many many Democrats in Washington or in State Houses around the country I get the flyers asking me to attend, they are delivered to my doorstep and then I watch the social media where my neighbors encourage us to join them in protest there also. And they do go; they make signs or buy them from vendors and they dress up in vulgar costumes and attempt to shame everyone that doesn't think like them or has the the moxie to stand for anything they don't.

    The Democratic Party in America truly has become the Devil with a blue dress on and it isn't just the women wearing the dress anymore, sometimes it is a man who probably has an identity crisis.