Redemption In November

Another article in this column is due today, and I’ve got bupkis. Life hasn’t been that inspiring lately, I guess. It’s not like there aren’t enough volatile topics hovering around the mess in Washington D.C., it’s just that I’ve been patently ignoring that whole scene for a little while. It was time to give my battered brain a break. Oh, I glance at the headlines and shake my head with disgust at the general direction of things, but I know I have no effect on the outcome of anything going on outside of my own tiny sphere of existence, and damned little of what takes place inside. My influences are quite limited, which is probably all to the greater good. The last thing this world needs is more disenchanted middle-aged pseudo-philosophers muttering into their beards. There’s enough public equivocating and rationalizing taking place to fill ten thousand columns, but writing about issues and changing the outcome are two completely different things. Again, I speculate about what happened to good old common sense, and not for the last time, I would imagine.

A visit to the web did little to improve my opinion of the situation. America has stumbled and fallen into a bottomless sinkhole, and may not make it back to the surface. The country continues to deteriorate, and I feel utterly helpless in the face of it. Nothing I can write, nothing I can say, will force those fools who still support that ugly little wart in the White House to reconcile with their complicity in his crimes. His philosophy remains the same no matter how badly it fails; he’s staying the course---even if it leads us into the tiger’s mouth. George W. Bush has shown himself time after time to be stupid, uncaring, incompetent, wasteful of our tax money, and unimaginably cruel to those of our citizens who are least able to defend themselves. He has no understanding whatsoever of what it means to be a normal, ordinary citizen, one who holds an ordinary job and lives in a normal neighborhood in a normal city. He has no understanding of how it feels to shoulder crushing debts all his working life, because every time he’s fallen into debt, the family fortune was there to save him. All his life he’s been rescued from one disaster of his own making after another, ran business concerns into the ground, and made excuses for his failures that laid the blame on others. His faith in his god leads him to believe he hears a holy voice inside his mushy head, and it directs him to do the things we all love him for, like lying to the nation in order to justify invading Iraq, and then supporting out-of-control troops as they slaughter countless numbers of innocent Iraqi citizens in their search for insurgents.

And yet we look on, feeling powerless to defend ourselves against this juggernaut of fascism. As we watch in stunned silence, our freedoms are being deleted “for our own protection.” While we watched and did nothing, the Republican Machine took away from our most helpless citizens their very lives, cutting off the funding for those much-needed social programs that keep millions from suffering from lives spent in excruciating poverty. A government ruled by those who will always have enough to eat perpetrated this outrage---they simply don’t care if millions of others suffer, as long as isn’t them.

We watched as our remaining forests were sold off to the big lumber companies, and we look on as millions of Americans go to work every day without health insurance to protect them and their families. We stood by as the national treasury was looted, while Bush’s rich friends took advantage of the situation by accepting huge tax breaks so they can keep even more of their obscene fortunes. As this is going on, thousands upon thousands of our war veterans have been stripped of the services they were promised for serving our country. Thousands of those veterans, still suffering from the ramifications of their wars, now live on the streets of our nation and must beg for their very survival. Tell me, America; was this what you envisioned when you voted for that jerk? Were you ready for the endless stream of lies and double deals, the bags of money changing hands under the table, the crushing blows to our elderly and disabled? Were you ready for unending war? The time to vote is approaching again, America. You have another chance.