Every day in the pages of American periodicals, we hear the same story: conflict. The conflict in America is laughable compared to the bloody, ceaseless, devastating carnage in other countries. I don't want to diminish the pain and suffering of Americans, because I know it's all to real and painful, but we do not have mass graves filled with freshly murdered bodies lying in either our inner cities or our suburbs. We do not occasionally encounter hordes of armed teenagers ready to shoot us because of their allegiance to a rebel group. We do not live in constant fear of open-air bombings tearing apart farmer's markets or shopping malls.
And yet ...
We Americans complain incessantly. About everything.
Our government, too, complains about everything. Our elected officials, whose jobs are pretty cushy and pay very well (a paycheck which lasts forever, by the way), bitch about everything the current administration is doing. I'm not just talking about Obama; I'm talking about every president, no matter what he's currently doing. Health care for all? Socialism! Anti-drug laws? Personal Infringement! Immigration reform? Hippie Liberalism! Ending foreign wars? Cowardice!
It's all bullshit. People can point to Iraq and its current state of chaos and blame the president for pulling out of that country, but who in their right might would stay in such a vortex of suckage? Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Central African Republic ... America can't fix everyone's problems. America (and it's elected officials) are too busy trying to keep their disgustingly profitable jobs (apparently by creating traffic jams, Chris Christie staffers...) to actually DO their jobs. And I'm sorry military hawks, but just because American blood was spilled in Iraq, we don't need to "finish the job" over there, or even "go back to help". American people are suffering from gross, financial inequality. Maybe we ought to spend some of that egregious military budget on improving the infrastructure of our own country. Maybe, just maybe, self-sufficiency is how nations become great. Maybe, just maybe, all we have to do is look at the continent of Africa to see how great foreign intervention is: Hacked up, carved up territories wherein people murder one another, and innocent people fear not only their governments, but each other.
America is TOO BIG. We total something like 370 million people now, and we have reached critical mass. We will never agree. Kurt Vonnegut had it right when he predicted the "Balkanized States of America" in Slaughterhouse Five. America cannot afford all its vainglorious habits, thus the average American citizen has to pain for that governmental pomposity. Socialism is only a bad word in the the American lexicon. Why? Because America is a nation which has gravitated to be a nation of, for, and by The Rich. The rest of us are screwed. We will work ourselves into the grave to pay for the things which we have been told we need, ignoring the idea of freedom upon which this amazing country was founded.
I, for one, am ready to reclaim those rights bestowed upon me by our Founding Fathers. Or ... I'll pray for the zombie apocalypse. I'm not sure what to wish for at this point. Our country is going down the toilet because of ideological differences which are vapid, at best. We disagree just to disagree. We disagree to have cocktail conversations. We disagree to get reelected (or get elected in the first place). And all that disagreement gets us nowhere.
Come on, America. We're better than this.
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