I write about the Fundamentalist Christians helping to shuttle in the coming Armageddon as if they were getting the spare room ready for a visiting relative. I post a story about the military filling up with Neo-Nazis and gang members and nobody in command thinking this might be a problem. I link to an article about our politicians making decisions to line their own pockets and screwing over our fellow citizens and everybody just accepts that as the status quo.
What does it take to make any of us sit with our jaws unhinged in complete disbelief?
I firmly believe that if many of the above incidents had happened twenty years ago they would have been front page stories in every newspaper in the country. Now good luck in finding them in most of the major papers. And if they do cover them they will disappear to make way for the next missing white woman or fake terrorist threat in a day or two.
Who are we now?
Our world is standing on its end and we just accept that fact without so much as a "Holy Shit"!
We are in the middle of an ideological war. If you are a Christian you are on one side, and if you are a Muslim you are on the other. Jews, you go stand with the Christians. Hindus you better get off of the streets until the bombs stop falling. Buddhists will meditate and pray for peace. And the Atheists, all 2% of us in America, well we just cannot fucking believe this is happening!
This is like living in a huge city and being trapped between rival gang members. You cannot join them because they are both wrong, so you just try to stay out of the damn way! But that will not work because both sides hate your ass and so you are just trying to stay out of the way until the killing stops. But this killing could go on for decades! We cannot just wait this one out.
So what do you want to do? Should we continue to rail against the machine until we grow hoarse or my typing fingers cramp up with arthritis? Should we just accept our fate and hope that things will eventually work themselves out? Or do we leave this country in the hopes of finding one that might actually still have a democracy?
Hmm.
You know what I think? I think that this country is too amazing to let it just be hi-jacked by these zealots. We can win, I know it! We are going to get this country back on an even keel and we are going to start to treat our neighbors with respect and understanding.
We are America!
And since we are America we have an obligation to lead the world in democracy and freedom. That means we hold elections that are honest and corruption free. That also means that we support the democracies in other countries and help them when they ask without making them jump through our hoops first. We put the needs of our planet first and not the needs of giant corporations that buy our Senators for pennies on the dollar. We will reserve our military options for the most dire of circumstances (Darfur anybody?), and not to threaten our neighbors with military force if they do not do our bidding.
If we start acting like the good steward that we should have been all along we will no longer have to fear terrorists or the nuclear proliferation of other countries. We can earn the respect of the rest of the world and truly be what we have claimed to be all along, the greatest nation on earth!
See, the thing is, the media is now all republican, or at least grovelling to them until they go away... so the progressives and the antiwar sentiments are not uttered except in the kitchens and living rooms across the nation.
ReplyDeleteThat 2/3 of us want out now, while the papers keep pushing the "stay the course" BS tells volumes. Not only do we need clean elections, we need to break up the media conglomerates asap!