Why the United States is Doomed
The American experiment has failed, or more precisely is on the precipice of failing. The sad part of this prognosis is that it’s not the American people who have failed directly, but make no mistake we all share some level of culpability. We have failed through the poor choices we and our parents have made. You see we’ve bought into some things and let some things happen that have brought our country to the edge of failure. We have allowed our government to be about two things, re-electing incumbents and the influence of money. It has all become solely about power and we have allowed for a system of governance where the determining factor for most elections is how much media can you buy, how many special interests can fund you and through that process how well can you distort reality to make your opponent out to be un-American, a Socialist, out to get senior citizens, planning to ruin our economy, planning to tax the rich, or not planning to tax the rich, not being born in this country, or being of the wrong religion, socio-economic class, or color.
The reason America is doomed is because what we have truly lost in the process of selling out our government is the truth. You see the truth doesn’t matter any more, science is abhorred, unless of course it is being used to find a new way to get people high, or make your I-phone better, faster, stronger, able to masturbate you while you surf the web with unlimited battery capacity on a 4G network.
How do I know this to be true? Because routinely when inaccuracies are pointed out by multiple fact checkers the political response is to misdirect or create confusion, to change the focus of the news as soon as possible. BOTH parties do this, it is the standard operating procedure of today’s politics. And people on both side of the aisle let pass because the other side does it to.
Also if you notice, both sides are always right, the other side is always wrong. I would ask you simply, what ideology have you ever encountered that is right 100% of the time. If that were possible, Fox News and MSNBC are never wrong and their stories, opinions and general bullshit are diametrically opposed, so they can’t both be right. Poor CNN who actually tries to what FOX News claims to be, fair and balanced, has seen it’s ratings tank in comparison to MSNBC and FOX News, that’s our fault folks, we are the ones who watch the shows, we create the ratings. We are telling the people who program our news that we are no longer interested in truth, or honest analysis. We want to watch people argue, make fun of the people of the other view and find out what Marge in Omaha thinks via the anchor’s Twitter feed.
I constantly see television ads that are obvious lies. If you believe what you see on TV, oil, gas and coal companies care more about local communities, economies and the environment than they do about profits. Please comment on this piece if you actually believe that to be true, because I have ocean front property for sale in Utah and I want you to have the first crack at it. This isn’t new folks, for decades people were told to smoke to soothe throat problems and that smoking isn’t bad for you and certainly not addictive. Tobacco companies, like all big corporations will lie to maximize quarterly profits because they know at the end of the day, the lawsuits mean nothing compared to their profits. You might think all of those smoking lawsuits destroyed the big tobacco companies, if you believe that, research a company named Altria. You might know it better by it’s Tobacco company name, Philip Morris.
America may have at one time been truly exceptional, but it wasn’t exceptional by decree of God like most Conservatives seem to believe. America was exceptional because we solved problems, we compromised when necessary to get things done, we put a priority on educating our children. That is not a result of a decree from God instead those are the characteristics of a multicultural, evolving and concerned citizenry. Not the petulant consumer children we have become.
There was a moment, shortly after the tragedy of 9/11 where America seemed like it found itself again. We put away the partisan bickering, we felt compassion for our fellow Americans. Except for a few incidents we didn’t go on a nationwide sweep of Muslims and close all of their mosques. I was proud of America for the first time in my life during that small window of time.
But that ended, we used the tragedy as a political tool to invade Iraq and it all slowly started to unravel again like a burning flag. Since that time we have seen nothing but increasing divisiveness, fewer civil liberties, new laws against protest, an ever-increasing home security agency that reaches into every facet of our lives, there are even Homeland Security Documents as part of your loan package when you buy a house.
We have polarized our politics to the point where the minority party will cheer for our economy to fail for their political gain. My God do you realize what that means? As the economy tumbles more children go into poverty and therefore more children die due to reduced nutrition and medical care. So in effect our governmental representatives would rather see children die than compromise 1% of their ideological beliefs. Maybe we should rename those idiotlogical beliefs. Now did any of them think that position through to that logical end, of course not, it’s just politics, a game that you win if you and your party get re-elected.
We’ve failed America, we’ve sold our truth, our country and our souls to special interests and corporations. We did it so we wouldn’t have to think and so we can buy more things. We abrogated our responsibility and in doing so have sold out our children’s future.
Two men are running for President of the United States of America and both are probably decent individuals. Both are the pictures of main stream America, family men, by all accounts good fathers and good husbands both are Christians as so many of you are and yet almost all of you hate one or the other and are willing to accuse them of horrible things. But both have willingly been manipulated by the political process to put their chances of election, or re-election before their actual core values and it’s too bad.
However neither of these men are worthy of your scorn or the names you choose to call them. It is the process that we have condoned that created the polarization in this country. Liberals are not interested in running this country into a Greek style debt crisis, Conservatives are not awful hateful people who don’t care about poor people. In fact, I doubt there are many true liberals or conservatives out there. Most of us have views that range across the spectrum, conservative on some things liberal on others. If you don’t then you probably aren’t thinking, as I said earlier, no one ideology is right 100% of the time.
America is on the precipice of doom but we can prevent it. The solution is to be compassionate, considerate of others views, the ability to compromise, a desire to operate off of facts, not opinions. We need to remove the insane money that drives our politics and maybe even go to open elections instead of primaries and elections pitting one party always against the other. Unfortunately, I’ve lost faith in this country, we are too selfish to do the things I suggest or to come to agreement on ways to improve things. It makes me sad that both of my grandfathers fought in World War II for an America Dream that no longer exists.
