The “We The People” has changed. It has been weakened. Political forces, I believe, have finally succeeded in convincing much of America that, as a people, we exist in two separate and opposing camps which can never reconcile their differences. Something new has reached us…. something bad.… something not cognoscente of how we became so great through the very diversity it opposes… and its tearing us apart.
I am very troubled, even hurt, by what I see in America today. Intellectually I understand the falling and the raising of political fortunes as well as the gulf which separates so many Americans ideologically, socially, financially and politically. There are vast differences of opinion among us regarding how we can, or should go forward as a world power, a prosperous nation and a place where we can all be free to pursue happiness without unnecessary interference, or encumbrance by our government, or anyone else for that matter.
Our diverse views, each strongly held, have been with us ever since the founding of our nation and yet over the past ten years something has changed. The “We The People” has changed. It has been weakened. Political forces, I believe, have finally succeeded in convincing much of America that, as a people, we exist in two separate and opposing camps which can never reconcile their differences. Something new has reached us …. something bad.… something not cognoscente of how we became so great through the very diversity it opposes….. and its tearing us apart.
In America today;
The unemployment rate is about 9.1 % …
Our U.S. Prison Population has topped 2,000,000 ….
We have over 3.5 million homeless U.S. Citizens including entire families….
China, Iran, Vietnam and the U.S. accounted for 97 percent of all global executions…
Over 36 million Americans live below the poverty level. That’s 13% and approximately 3.5 million of us are homeless, of which 1.35 million are children". . .
Over 6.2 million Americans have dropped out of High Schoolsince 2009...
US infrastructure is declining ….
We are involved in war, of one type or another, in several countries where American Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen, civilians and lots of foreign civilians are being killed every day…
While all of these terribly destructive things are tearing at what has taken 235 years to establish, U.S. Republicans, and Tea Party members in Congress and even Republican State legislators are knowingly and willingly frittering our valuable time and resources in an ideological purity campaign within their own ranks and discrediting other with disinformation campaigns like the one they partially succeeded in within their own U.S. ranks which implied the President of the United States is not an American citizen and others such as that Mexicans are a scourge on America and China has only the best interest of the U.S. established in their trade policies with us.
The Republicans are close to succeeding in eliminating Medicare, lowering taxes on corporations and billionaires while raising taxes on the working class, ending labor unions, privatizing our prisons and even some military responsibilities and , in the name of security, curtailing a few more of our Constitutional and moral liberties and rights while finding more and more reasons to remain in never-ending war, which I might add has vastly enriched American and foreign corporations who have shielded their vast fortunes in overseas accounts, safe from taxes which help to pay our military.
Republican policies have sought to make each and every working class American pay for the eight Republican led years of mindless spending and conducting wars on countries which never threatened American interests, either at home or abroad and indefensible tax cuts to giant Corporations and oil interest which has resulted in the gutting of the United States Treasury. As our own American home is burning, the radical ideas of hate politics, fear mongering, deregulation of our water, food and environmental standards, and other pursuits of the Republican party have tended to letting America, as we know it, burn down to the ground in a scorched earth Republican belief that they may have to destroy it all in order to save it, to save us.
The Republican Party of the last ten years has abandoned our forefathers beliefs regarding liberty and justice and seeks to replace that with the heavy hand of a quasi’ police state where justice is a murky outcome which rarely favors the poor, or helpless, or the working class citizens and where medical treatment is available only to those who can pay the price for it. The right wing agenda for America seeks to widen the social and economic gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots’, creating a tiered down labor force providing the cheap labor corporations need to compete more aggressively on the world market. Yes I know, we have always had these ideas brewing just below the surface in our political discourse, but what is so startling to me today is the actual successes the Republicans are having with their “take all the spoils” agenda wrapped in the American flag as they wave the holy Bible.
What’s even more surprising is the number of good and sincere Americans who are following the right wing hopes and dreams lock step, against their very own interests.
The Republican goal seems not to be a free, strong, wealthy and prospering America, but more a Right Wing America where exclusion is the norm and oligarchy by corporate-government hierarchy is the reality.
Although fewer in government every day, there are those who are standing against the right wing tide plaguing America. One of those, for example, is North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue who courageously uses her veto pen to stave off the uncompromising dismantling of North Carolina’s Education System, Unemployment assistance to unemployed workers throughout the state and voting rights which, only after decades of struggle were achieved for rich, poor, white, black, brown and red, educated and uneducated alike. Although a beacon in the night, the walls around her are crumbling as Democratic legislators in North Carolina, for reasons of self survival mostly, side with the Right Wing, Tea Party and Corporate interests; So many having forgotten that it was North Carolina who stood against the tide of the time and refused to sign the U.S. Constitution without it’s accompanying Bill of Rights, ensuring the place and rights of individuals in our union. Is it possible that we have forgotten that liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others
As Rome Burns, most of us are simply standing by and watching it all happen. I think that is what frightens me most of all.
“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power“ Benjamin Franklin
MARSHALL ADAME