Sara Robinson put up a new piece at Alternet yesterday that should give pause to every die hard Red Stater who still has any working brain cells. Ayn Rand Worshippers Should Face Facts: Blue States Are the Providers, Red States Are the Parasites.
What if they succeeded in making America red from coast to coast? Robinson riffs off their dirty little secret: they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them. Here's a taste from the near the beginning of the commentary:
But maybe it's time to admit that we're being played for chumps, and that there are people in the rest of the country who are taking way too much advantage of our good nature. After all: it's now a stone fact that the blue states and cities are the country's real wealth creators. That's why we pay more taxes, and are able to send that money to the red states in the first place. We're working our butts off, being economically productive, going to college, raising good kids, supporting reality-based schools, keeping our marriages together, tending to our busy and diverse cities, and generally Playing By The Rules. And the fates have smiled on us in rough proportion to the degree that we’ve invested in our own common good.
So we've got every right to get good and angry about the fact that, by and large, the people who are getting our money are so damned ungrateful -- not to mention so ridiculously eager to spend it on stuff we don't approve of. We didn't ship them our hard-earned tax dollars to see them squandered on worse-than-useless abstinence-only education, textbooks that teach creationism, crisis-pregnancy misinformation centers, subsidies for GMO crops and oil companies, and so on. And we sure as hell didn't expect to be rewarded for our productivity and generosity with a rising tide of spittle-flecked insanity about how we’re just a bunch of immoral, godless, drug-soaked, sex-crazed, evil America-hating traitors who can’t wait to hand the country over to the Islamists and the Communists.
Read the whole thing. Share it on Facebook. Link to it. Send it to those right-wingnut relatives who are always getting in your face about how liberals are destroying the country.
And thank Sara Robinson for telling it like it really is, and doing it so well.