O.K., O.K., I can’t hold it in any longer.  I’ve got to rant... just a little... and not about religion.  We’ve got a new Pope (finally one from “the Americas”) who will surely shine new light on religious life in the Twenty-first Century. I’m not kidding. I’ve always liked St. Francis of Assisi, so Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio having chosen the name Francis gives me hope.  

So it’s politics, not religion...  I decided to find out a little more about Paul Ryan than I had bothered to learn before today... mainly because I wasn’t interested in knowing more about him... and after his and his running mate’s loss in the 2012 presidential race, I had hoped not to have any reason to know more about him.  No such luck.  When he trotted out his new budget, which looked pretty much like the one he worked up last fall, I began to see him as a slow learner. What makes him think Americans are dimwitted enough to think his new budget represents a fresh approach? Maybe it’s the company he keeps.  

Paul Ryan has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1998.  Before 1998 he was first legislative aid to Representative Bob Kastnen... then to Sam Brownback, and finally to Jack Kemp, after which he did a stint as a speech writer before running for congress in his home state of Wisconsin.  Paul is one of four children born into a middle class Roman Catholic family in Janesville, Wisconsin...  a family, which by the way, has benefited from the Social Security program, which also by the way, Representative Ryan has continually lobbied to weaken since he has been a congressman. Apparently, since he was a teenager receiving a Social Security check every month, his thinking has changed so he now considers social security a first step toward socialism which he declares is bad. When his father died of a heart attack when Paul was 16, he received Social Security survivors benefits until his 18th birthday.  He acknowledges that those benefits helped him pay for college.  Having worked the grill for a time at McDonalds when he was in high school drawing Social Security, Ryan knows something about earning minimum wage. He must surely have worked alongside some people who had to live on a McDonalds salary without additional support from Social Security or from a middle class family with considerable means. Let me be quick to say that I’m not faulting Paul Ryan for being Catholic, for having “been on Social Security,” for having worked for minimum wage, nor for his having earned his income from a government job since he got out of college.  I don’t find anything wrong with any of his published history. What surprises me is that he apparently hasn’t learned much about what life is like for the 48 million people in the United States who live below the poverty level.  

Paul Ryan talks a lot about government, about how the cost of government is too high and about how he wants to shrink government by shifting responsibility to the private sector for ensuring continuation of the culture he has enjoyed and wants his children to inherit. He says shrinking government is now his primary goal... since he and the majority leader of the Senate have had to give up the goal of denying President Obama a second term in office. He clearly wants to keep his job in the government which has paid his salary and provided generous benefits for most of his adult life.  Am I missing something here?  

I admit to being a soft touch... for being easily persuaded that there are billions of people sharing the planet with me who aren’t as fortunate as I am, mostly through no fault of their own, and that millions of them share citizenship with me in the wonderful America where I live.  Trot out pictures of children who look hungry and ill clothed, and I’m ready to support programs designed to get food to them and to make it possible for them to have the kinds of clothes that I was fortunate enough to be able to provide for my children. Those pictures in magazines and on the Internet of children cruelly deformed from birth get me reaching for my wallet every time.  Thank you, Marlo Thomas and St. Jude and Father Joe and Doctors without Borders!  But those people and those organizations can’t meet the huge need without good, responsible, compassionate government. For my argument it’s not necessary to trot out economic statistics that are published regularly in every city and town in America.  Because they go to them regularly for money to run for reelection, it’s surely no secret to the people in Congress that we have in our country more unimaginably wealthy citizens than we’ve ever had before this time.  I guess it’s harder for candidates for reelection to see that we also have more of our citizens struggling under the burden of abject poverty than at any time since the Great Depression. 

I was going to launch into several more paragraphs about how I’m not persuaded by pictures of doe-eyed Mr. Ryan, head slightly tilted as if pleading for approval, with or without his shirt on, that he has tried hard enough to work in bipartisan relationship with representatives from both parties to come up with a reasonable, realistic budget... but I acknowledge that would be going to far. I don’t think it’s inappropriate, however, to say “God Bless America” which Is what politicians almost always say after speaking their mind...  GOD BLESS AMERICA!