Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Angry Post
I'm feeling even more angry than usual at the current state of affairs in this country, so I'm going to blow off some steam. You're welcome to skip the steam, of course, but you might find some food for thought.
Americans born in the second half of the 20th century are a trying group of people. Americans have always been arrogant SOBs, a quality we inherited from our European conqueror forebears, and we also tend to be very focused inward. Don't bother us with global issues unless it's just one black and white enemy.
All humans are wired to be self-deceptive, and Americans have this quality ironed out to a T. We live in a big country, we (theoretically) have all we need here, so why worry about the rest of the world, right? Except of course if we're told we have a black-and-white enemy that we must attack.
To be fair, this really only applies to about half of all Americans, and even those, once you scratch below their lazy, ignorant surface to explain the big picture, sometimes actually start to get it. The current polls suggest that it took a while but the half of us that saw our country going to hell in a hand basket have grown to almost three-quarters.
Nevertheless, I used to give my fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of good people in this country. But I've come to accept that there are also a lot of ignorant followers who just blindly follow authority as if they never grew up beyond age three. They chant U-S-A as if there is no other country on earth. Ironically, most of the other countries on earth look at our Charters of Freedom and, until recently, when the current power mongers took it on themselves to start destroying them, saw them as a beacon of hope. We are a nation of immigrants for a reason. Europeans put up with "ugly Americans," because they knew that our arrogance was simply a byproduct of being brought up in the greatest democracy the world has known. And many Americans who traveled often traveled to the homes of their immigrant forebears, which both humbled them and opened their eyes to the bigger world.
So it isn't all their fault. The drive of our economy to create bigger and bigger corporations and institutions, the drive of humans to create bureaucracy (it is a great way to keep one's job), continually cycles us through robber baron eras, and robber barons find it very convenient to have a compliant consumer-driven population. So we are incentivized to watch TV and TV ads, and to watch 24-hour news programs that contain virtually no news. (For a taste of this, one need only watch the periodic segment on The Daily Show called, "Slow News Day.") We are whipped into a frenzy to support sports where the players and owners make more in one season than most of us make in a lifetime. Tracking Hollywood box office every weekend has become a hobby for people, they actually bet on it like it was the stock market.
But the fact remains: We have a choice. We can be like the one-quarter to one-third of Americans who are willing to roll over because they would rather fill their mind with the bubble gum of pop culture and use the excuse that one person can't do anything anyway, so let the Hitlers and Stalins and Nixons and Kissingers and Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the world have their way. (If you think this group is not analogous, you DO need a history lesson) We can immerse ourselves in pop culture, following the daily lives of Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins, and American Idol. We can turn BO betting into a hobby, we can sit in our La-Z-Boys with our chips and soda pop and watch baseball or football all weekend.
OR we can go outside and work in the garden. We can turn on real news programs or actually READ a decent Sunday newspaper. We can read some good fiction and non-fiction books that teach us both facts and literary lessons. We can get on the web and find alternative news so that we can learn what's really happening in the war, and what Constitutional abuses the government has been up to this week. We can talk to our friends about the outrage we feel at how our country has been hijacked. We can march in anti-war protests and we can write to our Congressional delegation.
If you think I'm just full of it, that pop culture is the be-all and end-all, then this blog isn't for you. But if you're too blind or too ignorant or too brainwashed to see how our founder's legacy is being destroyed, then you deserve to be at the wrong end of an economy and Constitution that are being destroyed. The problem is, the rest of us don't. Which means, simply put, the framers did not create this land for you. You may leave.
U-S-A is a PARTICIPATORY Democracy. The citizen sovereigns RUN this country and we have a RESPONSIBILITY to stand up for it when those in power become power drunk and start to drive our country off a cliff. These people in Washington are our SERVANTS. They work for us, they do our bidding to ensure that OUR country is run the way WE want it run. But right now they've made too many of us believe we work for them.
It's time for us to grab the wheel and the keys and stomp on the brakes. IT'S OUR JOB. We do not sit back and wait for them to sober up on their own (they're power drunks, they won't), we do not sit back and ignore it all and hope it will go away (it will, but then so will we, probably dead of starvation due to the depression that is likely to set in due to almost 10 TRILLION dollars of debt), we do not deny and deceive ourselves that things are actually much better than they are. And most of all, we do not allow these paternalistic bastards think they know what's best for us, let alone give them an excuse to act like our daddies.
Their only interest is in themselves and their powerful, wealthy friends. They don't give a flying fart in a doughnut hole for us. They are the daddies that run off with the cute young thing as soon their wives become a little older and worn out from bearing children. They are the daddies force us into therapy because they turned out to be a--holes.
Bush was convicted for DUI in graduate school. He may be a dry drunk now, but he's doing a fine job demonstrating how our country is trapped in a car being driven right off the cliff by a codependent. IT IS OUR JOB to stop this.
Americans born in the second half of the 20th century are a trying group of people. Americans have always been arrogant SOBs, a quality we inherited from our European conqueror forebears, and we also tend to be very focused inward. Don't bother us with global issues unless it's just one black and white enemy.
All humans are wired to be self-deceptive, and Americans have this quality ironed out to a T. We live in a big country, we (theoretically) have all we need here, so why worry about the rest of the world, right? Except of course if we're told we have a black-and-white enemy that we must attack.
To be fair, this really only applies to about half of all Americans, and even those, once you scratch below their lazy, ignorant surface to explain the big picture, sometimes actually start to get it. The current polls suggest that it took a while but the half of us that saw our country going to hell in a hand basket have grown to almost three-quarters.
Nevertheless, I used to give my fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of good people in this country. But I've come to accept that there are also a lot of ignorant followers who just blindly follow authority as if they never grew up beyond age three. They chant U-S-A as if there is no other country on earth. Ironically, most of the other countries on earth look at our Charters of Freedom and, until recently, when the current power mongers took it on themselves to start destroying them, saw them as a beacon of hope. We are a nation of immigrants for a reason. Europeans put up with "ugly Americans," because they knew that our arrogance was simply a byproduct of being brought up in the greatest democracy the world has known. And many Americans who traveled often traveled to the homes of their immigrant forebears, which both humbled them and opened their eyes to the bigger world.
So it isn't all their fault. The drive of our economy to create bigger and bigger corporations and institutions, the drive of humans to create bureaucracy (it is a great way to keep one's job), continually cycles us through robber baron eras, and robber barons find it very convenient to have a compliant consumer-driven population. So we are incentivized to watch TV and TV ads, and to watch 24-hour news programs that contain virtually no news. (For a taste of this, one need only watch the periodic segment on The Daily Show called, "Slow News Day.") We are whipped into a frenzy to support sports where the players and owners make more in one season than most of us make in a lifetime. Tracking Hollywood box office every weekend has become a hobby for people, they actually bet on it like it was the stock market.
But the fact remains: We have a choice. We can be like the one-quarter to one-third of Americans who are willing to roll over because they would rather fill their mind with the bubble gum of pop culture and use the excuse that one person can't do anything anyway, so let the Hitlers and Stalins and Nixons and Kissingers and Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the world have their way. (If you think this group is not analogous, you DO need a history lesson) We can immerse ourselves in pop culture, following the daily lives of Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins, and American Idol. We can turn BO betting into a hobby, we can sit in our La-Z-Boys with our chips and soda pop and watch baseball or football all weekend.
OR we can go outside and work in the garden. We can turn on real news programs or actually READ a decent Sunday newspaper. We can read some good fiction and non-fiction books that teach us both facts and literary lessons. We can get on the web and find alternative news so that we can learn what's really happening in the war, and what Constitutional abuses the government has been up to this week. We can talk to our friends about the outrage we feel at how our country has been hijacked. We can march in anti-war protests and we can write to our Congressional delegation.
If you think I'm just full of it, that pop culture is the be-all and end-all, then this blog isn't for you. But if you're too blind or too ignorant or too brainwashed to see how our founder's legacy is being destroyed, then you deserve to be at the wrong end of an economy and Constitution that are being destroyed. The problem is, the rest of us don't. Which means, simply put, the framers did not create this land for you. You may leave.
U-S-A is a PARTICIPATORY Democracy. The citizen sovereigns RUN this country and we have a RESPONSIBILITY to stand up for it when those in power become power drunk and start to drive our country off a cliff. These people in Washington are our SERVANTS. They work for us, they do our bidding to ensure that OUR country is run the way WE want it run. But right now they've made too many of us believe we work for them.
It's time for us to grab the wheel and the keys and stomp on the brakes. IT'S OUR JOB. We do not sit back and wait for them to sober up on their own (they're power drunks, they won't), we do not sit back and ignore it all and hope it will go away (it will, but then so will we, probably dead of starvation due to the depression that is likely to set in due to almost 10 TRILLION dollars of debt), we do not deny and deceive ourselves that things are actually much better than they are. And most of all, we do not allow these paternalistic bastards think they know what's best for us, let alone give them an excuse to act like our daddies.
Their only interest is in themselves and their powerful, wealthy friends. They don't give a flying fart in a doughnut hole for us. They are the daddies that run off with the cute young thing as soon their wives become a little older and worn out from bearing children. They are the daddies force us into therapy because they turned out to be a--holes.
Bush was convicted for DUI in graduate school. He may be a dry drunk now, but he's doing a fine job demonstrating how our country is trapped in a car being driven right off the cliff by a codependent. IT IS OUR JOB to stop this.
Comments:
Post a Comment
