Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

Do you deserve to live?

The capitalist system places a dollar value on everything and everyone. More dollars mean greater value. Greater value means greater virtue, because success is money, and success is good. The rich really are better than the rest of us, simply because they are rich.

When ambition is satisfied with modest returns, a money-based system can perk along fairly sustainably. But ambition is a virtue in the pursuit of money, and the power that money represents. A money-seeking system stimulates ambition.

When someone's pursuit of money succeeds enough to surpass a certain threshold, the money itself attracts more money. But social forces will also be trying to strip away that money, as other seekers try to get their own pile. A big enough pile of money creates its own community, feeding off of it and supporting it, which is why immensely wealthy people are not bled dry and left as stripped carcasses. The ownership of the fortune is irrelevant to the industry that forms to exploit it. The symbionts know better than to kill the host.

Sometimes the symbionts turn into parasites and do kill the host. Or the pile of money is too small to breed its own protective colony of workers and soldiers, so rival colonies raid it. Picture the poor schmoe whose investment portfolio tanks, leaving him without a retirement income just when he needs it. Sorry, loser! Please see the Assisted Suicide Department for your new retirement plan.

Unfortunately, fortunes are often made in destructive endeavors. The supporting community that feeds off of the wealth at the center of it must therefore serve the destructive enterprise faithfully in order to maintain position. The destructive enterprises tear down society as a whole, but this only makes the island built around wealth look like a more vital refuge against personal failure, poverty, and misery.

All the while, humans have been getting better and better at staying alive. Even during the mass slaughter of World War II, the human population went up, as we fought back against the diseases and famines that had always been more deadly to us than our own aggressive tendencies. All those people want to live. They look for the necessities first and luxuries soon afterward.

Clearly, a lot of the world's population still seeks to secure the necessities, while a privileged minority seeks more and more luxury. That privileged core shrinks steadily as it attracts more and more resources to itself. This places an ever growing number of people at risk of calamity.

A major part of the problem is the ever growing number itself. Instinct drives us to replicate. Hardship encourages us to replicate more energetically, so that someone might survive to carry on. Instinct never notices how successful this imperative has already been. And instinct gets awfully whiny when intellect tries to take a different path.

In a world already carrying more people than the ecosystem can support, people from many different belief systems can see the value of eliminating some of them. The ranks of the disposable will vary depending on the belief system. Even that is based in instinct, as our centuries of warfare over territory and resources will attest.

The United States is currently under the control of a faction that believes with religious fervor in the notion that your monetary worth defines your actual worth. They'll pay lip service to charity, but their actions betray the sink or swim mentality that motivates their policies. It's pay to play here in the land of the free.

Pay to play sounds okay as a way to eliminate the dead wood, as long as you believe that a person's ability to attract money is the primary filter by which we should select. Get a job, slacker! Pull your weight! No work, no eat! Of course a sufficiently disciplined communist or socialist society could say the same things, without the slippery pricing structure. Truly inert people are a drain on any form of society. But in capitalism as currently practiced in the United States, every person is an independent contractor, trying to negotiate prices in a hostile marketplace where everything is priced for the vendors' maximum profit.

I'll bet insurance actuaries have already figured out the optimum lifespan that will provide the most profit. This information will be more tightly guarded than the nuclear launch codes, and is potentially more explosive. But it is also a moving target, as the people's earning power changes. For vast numbers of us, that change is downward.

Is downward bad? A massive die-off, particularly among industrialized nations, would take a lot of pressure off of the environment. First you become poor. Then the industrialist system makes sure you die of it. The industrialist system subsequently dies because no one is left to buy its products, but it's a good run of quarterly reports leading up to that. Think of mass death among the poor as the ultimate layoff.

I try to be a useful citizen, but I set myself against the destructive economy decades ago. Thus, I have been worthless to society my entire adult life. Promoting tolerance and a gentle, largely non-motorized lifestyle is an attack on what the monetarians believe makes this country great. If a younger generation decides I was on the right track, norms may shift, but I fear it will be too late for me. Even if the social climate embraces sustainable and kindly practices, it may discover that longevity is itself unsustainable. A person needs to be contributing to the general welfare. Anyone who does not is just an expensive pet. That includes Grandmom and Granddad. Who cares if you're still enjoying yourself? If we have to chip in for expensive medical interventions, you need to go out into the wilderness and quit burdening the tribe.

It's easy to play with such thought experiments until the pangs of age start to chip away at you. Life is a habit. Even in my darkest depression (so far) I don't want to give it up. But logic inclines me more frequently to run a balance sheet on myself to see if it might be time to get out of the way. I dread the day when I can't make the equation work in my favor. I also find myself running the calculation every morning.

Having failed to provide myself with the protective cocoon of money I would need to pay for the various medical services that an aging person requires, I don't deserve to live, as far as capitalism is concerned. I can spin the game out a bit longer by selling my home and most of my possessions. Poor people don't deserve homes and possessions. And in nature, any creature that can no longer furnish a nest and dodge predators will shortly become food. So by any measure, the vast majority of humans do no good, even if they do no harm. The bottom line is suffering. Ask not what the money supply can do for you. Ask what you can do for the money supply.