The man

A couple days ago I mentioned my distaste for the idea of states rights as an excuse to avoid making positive change on the federal level, then I briefly stated that I didn't really get why people distrusted the federal government so much.
I feel like I should elaborate on that, given that I go full conspiracy theorist occasionally and have rarely shown much support of "the man" in any form.

I don't trust the government to do the right thing, at any level, from the average beat cop all the way to the president, yet sometimes they still manage to make good things happen anyway, I don't count on it, and change happens it seems despite the governments best efforts, yet it still happens even so.

In a way, the massive bureaucracy of the federal government works in it's favor though, it is really hard to make change happen, and so it can be pretty hard to pass negative laws or gut programs as much as some would like to, it is rife with corruption, but the competing sources of corruption seem to spend as much time working against each other as they do together, and little is accomplished, yet sometimes things pass anyway, most recently Obamacare, which despite its flaws is a historical piece of legislation and its passing will make a very convenient place for historians to mark where we started getting on the right track.

Historically, while I am not an expert, it seems to me that very little positive change happened without the federal government pushing for it, going back as far as the Civil War and slavery itself, wanna talk states rights being a problem? How about half the country killing the other half for the right to own people?

For other federal stuff, how about the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or OSHA? How about Executive Order 9981? Which desegregated the military well in advance of the Civil Rights act? The Supreme Court has done some work for good too, Brown vs The Board of Education being a fairly big on, Roe v Wade another.

The point is, if we waited for all the states to enact that shit themselves, well, for one thing we'd still be two countries, for another the majority of the country would be a pretty shitty place to live, even more so than now!

See, while the federal government is rife with corruption and doesn't care about me a a person at all, the state and local governments do, and from what I can tell they do mostly hate me and people like me, and what they think about minorities and other protected classes doesn't even bear thinking about. But we will anyway, look at Wisconsin for example, Scott Walker has gone straight from his utter failure of a presidential run straight back to attempting to ruin his state even more, he's already massively cut welfare and other entitlement programs, crushed the unions and the ability of public employees to bargain, among other things, but just earlier today he signed into law a bill that will prevent investigation into just the sort of corruption and incompetence he has been investigated  twice for already.

Chris Christie already runs his state like a personal fiefdom, fortunately he is term limited and someone else will need to cleanup his mess, and good luck to them.

Arizona is a goddamned hellhole and shows no sign of changing, pushing increasingly draconian ID requirements for voting, as well as the continued employment of Sheriff Joe Arpaio showing us exactly how those in power there feel about their largest minority group.

The only reason it isn't actively illegal to belong to a union, or to be a minority, or to speak up against the government in these states is because the federal government passed laws making it so. So when I hear someone say the phrase "States Rights" I almost immediately can tell that they aren't about to start talking about marijuana laws, but rather about to shit on a minority, or the poor, or both, mostly both.

Fuck those people, at least the federal government is only huge, uncaring of the individual, and ruled by fear an paranoia, it doesn't seem to hate me at least.