I leaf through the papers and news magazines, I flip the news channels on the TV and I click through the political and governmental blogs on my computer and more and more I see the overwhelming evidence that we as a nation are unhappy with our lives and our country.
But can this be? This is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the greatest country the world has ever seen, so why the hell are we all so angry? Maybe it’s because, right at this moment, the greatest country in the world isn’t living up to its billing. Why not, what’s wrong? Our stores are overflowing with high end goods, we are just about to pass out of the worst depression since 1929, (don’t kid yourself, it was a depression) and we’re almost ready to bring our kids home from Afghanistan. Why aren’t we happy?
Denmark is happy, Sweden, despite its awful weather and onerous suicide rate is happy, France is even happy, especially at meal time; why aren’t we happy? Could it be that the promise of America isn’t being fulfilled? Let’s look at a couple of areas and see just how well we’re doing.
Americans work longer hours and have less vacation time than any of our industrialized contemporaries, they pay more for medical service but get less functional care than of any western European country. America’s pre-college education system, once the model for the world now ranks 17th of all nations, just ahead of such world-renowned academic models as Russia, Slovakia and Hungry. Do you find this disgraceful? I do too, and those are just the tip of the fast melting iceberg.
Old fashioned crime, the kind where the bad guys came equipped with a gun and a mask and robbed banks seems to be slipping away but real crime, where the crooks wear business suits and steal from widows and orphans is out of control and according to our incompetent Attorney General so big as to be unassailable.
Some of us can still remember when dad worked, mom stayed home to take care of the kids and we lived in our own homes, had our own car, sometimes two and when it came time to go to college there was a little nest egg to help us get through it without acquiring a debt equal to GNP of a medium sized emerging nation.
Now moms and dads both work and don’t take home together as much as our dads once did alone, and they can’t afford that second car and if we are lucky enough to get out of our failing secondary schools with enough knowledge to get into college, we are sure to get out of college facing indentured servitude for most of our adult life. Why is this?
Well, part of it is because we’re so busy earning a living, raising our kids and keeping up with our social, obligations, that we haven’t kept track of what’s going on around us and in our government, and part of it is because we’re lazy.
After WWII there was a palpable energy in this country, an energy that no longer manifests itself. Victory does that, especially victory against an aggressor, against the bad guys. I can’t recall our country feeling that way since. In almost 70 years we have fought lots of wars but none of them was against aggression; at least not aggression that actually threatened us. We came out of WW II as far and away the strongest country in the world and despite a couple of unfulfilled threats, no has wanted to take us on since.
Unfortunately, we haven’t felt the same way. We have, ostensibly for humane purposes, been the aggressor in any number of wars since 1946. We always had a reason to wreck havoc in someone else’s country, but it was rarely convincing, and to those with a strong moral compass, thoroughly depressing.
Since 1950 we have constantly been at war or causing trouble someplace in the world and never with a good reason. Sure, the book says that we had to fight the Commies in Korea and then in Vietnam, all while we were holding off the Ruskies all over the world and for what? Korea was a threat to us? Vietnam was a threat? The Russians were ready to start an atomic war? The only nation we have to worry about starting an atomic war is us. We are still the only people in the world who have exploded an atomic weapon in anger, and that scares the shit out of everyone else in the world. You can take that to the bank.
We went to war in 1941, to save the world from aggression. We were the heroes. That was great for national morale. Everybody felt it. We were the good guys and we won. Well, look around gang. We haven’t been the good guys since. Every single war we have been involved in since 1950 has been aimed at getting something that belonged to someone else. We are the bullies of the world. We are no longer saving the world for freedom, we are saving specific places in the world because they have something we, or more specifically, our corporate masters, want. And that’s only part of what’s wrong with America today.
We are depressed as a nation. First because we aren’t living what we have been told is the American dream. 99% of us are so busy trying to survive that we have no time to actually participate in the American dream. That same 99% is, without realizing it, depressed because we are no longer proud to be Americans. We look around and we see every single thing that we have been brought up to believe is right, being ignored, compromised, subverted or bought off.
Our country is blowing up women and children in other parts of the world because we want the oil under their mud huts. We are constantly lied to by the barons of industry, who care nothing that they are poisoning our planet, as long as they can show a positive bottom line. We are torturing people with seemingly no regard to the gravity of the circumstances. We no longer praise whistleblowers who, are after all, the truth tellers who show us the cracks in our government. Now we prosecute them, and more often than not, we do it unfairly. We are willing to let our neighbors slide from poverty, into ruin rather than ask those who have more than enough, to help. This is not the America I grew up in or if it is, at least it was then mitigated by a wiser, less greedy and more humane corporate hierarchy. Or maybe they just had better press agents.
I read a piece by Tom Englehart the other day where he coined the most accurate and apropos word I have heard in a long, long time. “Terrarist”, someone who attacks the land. It is used to identify those billionaire fossil fuel magnets who, in the name of corporate profit, are destroying our planet. And the additional problem is that not only are the CEOs of Shell, BP, Exxon, etc. creating a product that will ultimately kill us all, but their seeming invulnerability leaves us all with that deepening sense of despair that I describe in the opening of this article.
Everywhere we look we see problems. Always they are problems that appear to have solutions but solutions that we cannot put in practice. A bridge fell down in the state of Washington the other day. It wasn’t the first bridge that has fallen down lately and it won’t be the last. Many have been screaming about our failing infrastructure for years but instead of fixing it and actually putting people to work doing it, we allow a sequester to pass that takes money from infrastructure repair and also causes us to furlough over 100,000 workers for a day, which reduces their ability to add to the desperately needed consumer base. And why did we pass this sequester, to help deflate a deficit that was already deflating and that given time and an increase of employment would all but disappear. The stupidity is mind boggling.
And what makes it all, consummately frustrating is that none of it has to be this way. What makes it infuriating is that it is only this way because of our own laziness. We have allowed our country to fall into the hands of a cabal of billionaires who have no interest in any American way but theirs, who care nothing for the country they have bought and are now selling, but care only for themselves and their own ability to live a life far above that of their fellow citizens.
This is not the first time his situation has existed in this country. It was like this in the very early 20th century when the Carnegie’s and the Rockefellers ate the landscape. They were the Koch brothers of their time. What stopped them then? Maybe it was the great depression of 1913, maybe it was a fear of what was happening in Russia in 1917, or maybe it was the image of what had happened to France just after our own revolution. All these are visions that should be well studied by the, would be, industrial emperors of 21st century America. There is only so long that you can step on the necks of a people who thought they were free. Especially if it is a people who you were short sighted enough to amply supply with an overabundance of weapons, just to make a little more money.