Saturday, January 19, 2008

Taking a station break

I've been working on a post for this site since the first of the year. I meant to put it up at the first of the year, and wanted to let you know I haven't forgotten and have been working. It started as a message to Hillary Clinton, and snowballed into a description of my astonished disappointment with the campaign and candidates. Granted, I expected the campaign to be pathetic, and it is, with its zero issue discussion. It could be worse: we aren't submerged in total absolutism yet. My reading in recent weeks has yielded a nice eye-opener about why we are where we are in politics, war, who really runs things and where we're headed.
The bad news is, if we aren't already there we're very close and will be there any minute. Even Pat Buchanon, a Nixon-era, conservative republican, recently stated Dennis Kucinich is the only real candidate in the pack. The rest of the campaign is a carnival freak show-horror between a random bunch of ghouls racing to declare him or herself the Antichrist. Of course, when a chief executive is allowed to violate the law with his every thought and act, as CheneyBush has done, it sets a bad example and doesn't attract the brightest and best to the festival. Something else is happening. It takes more than a little space to explain, and it goes unacknowledged by almost everyone, making putting it into words difficult and emotionally trying. What's happening and where we are headed is a very dark place, and universal health care won't save anyone. The campaign, politics, where we are and where we go grows daily into the bigger story of how the promises of American democracy and the evolution of technology are unfulfilled as greedy people attempt to take over the world.
It's a different picture than I expected, and it comes as no surprise; however, I'm shocked with how close our evil, self-appointed overlords have come to meeting their goals. It's certainly closer than I thought I'd see in my lifetime. Viewed beside the mass market's don't-care attitude, it's unbelievable. When I think of how good life could be except for this greed, my heart is broken anew. I concluded that between wanting to win elections and build better weapons, the rush to authoritarian totalitarianism for the U.S. and the world has consumed both major parties. Having funded defense with two-thirds of our tax revenue, a funny thing happened: we bought more than security, we sold our bodies and souls to the war industry. The industry has begun to feed, and is poised to feed on us, because some people think the world is too densely populated for the entitled to become truly wealthy.
It's a gloomy thought, that we're all merely meat for some nebulous grinder, and there is no indication as to when the grinding begins. Sadly, each day makes it easier. Bad actors act worse and grow stronger, the population sees nothing as the greedy move to cull and enslave the world. People don't want to talk about it because they don't know. They want change, but they don't know what the change is, lost in their government's asserting they should hate Mexicans and fence them out and letting them have any and every job once inside the country. Do we buiild fences for them, too? Are we still hating Iraqis, Christmas and gay matrimony? It's easy to understand why people are confused.
You ain't seen nothin'. Think it's confusing now? You can be attacked by an arsenal of new weapons for which there is no common defense, their development paid for by your tax dollars and their existence kept as quiet as humanly possible. Changing Washington's majority won't fix it, and the people who've felt so safe defending the new radical right are as vulnerable as anyone. So, I'll keep working on it and get that posted. Meanwhile, ask yourself a question...
...with 80% of the country opposed to Bush's middle east wars, why can't we get even one mainstream presidential candidate who is anything short of the most strident war hawk on the planet? You know the answer.