Let me start with the positive: There are still caring, passionate, intelligent, and sane Americans in our public square -- All you need to do is spend an afternoon reading Kos diaries and watching MSNBC and now Current TV in the evenings.
Without these islands of rationality, the oceans of turbulence that inundate the rest of our national discourse would consume all hope of ever again finding a safe port to rescue America's drowning future.
And the truth is that we have entered a new era of jeopardy for our country and, by extension, for our planet.
You cannot run a country -- even one as powerful and wealthy as ours -- by continuously making terrible decisions after terrible decisions.
You cannot run a country by giving gigantic economic advantages and tax breaks to the most wealthy of the wealthy while allowing the vast broad majority of middle and working class families to suffer, wither, die.
You cannot ignore massive challenges like global warming and our dependence on foreign sources of oil without taking any real substantial action -- decade after decade -- to make any real changes in our energy policies.
You cannot continue to allow our country's infrastructure to crumble and become more and more inefficient with each passing year and hope to compete in the 21st century economy.
You cannot send more and more jobs overseas and allow Wall St and corporate profits to soar for the mega wealthy while working stiffs lose all hope and any chance to raise a family, provide shelter and food and a better life for their children.
You cannot waste trillions of dollars on endless wars of choice that either no longer have any bearing on our direct national security or, in the case of Iraq, never did.
You cannot hope to compete with rising economic superpowers like China and India and traditional economic superpowers like Germany without making smart investments in our clean energy economy, our smarter and more efficient energy grid, our education system, our worker training programs, our infrastructure, our people.
If you want to know how America is dying, all you need to do is read two pieces out this week -- one from Mother Jones offering charts that should be seen by every American, the other a 7,000 word tome in Rolling Stone by a man who should have been president and whose stolen election may have been the final nail in America's coffin.
America is becoming a hopeless cause.
Our country is drowning in debt while the mega wealthy pay so little in taxes that many of their corporations actually run a net positive exchange with the federal treasury.
Our jobs are being outsourced and eliminated while corporate America is allowed to sit on record profits and hoard trillions in cash.
Our oil companies so dominate the debate in Washington that even while they are making record profits and even when we desperately need to invest in our 21st century clean energy future to liberate ourselves from foreign oil and save ourselves from climate calamity, we continue to shell out billions in subsidies.
Our health insurance companies continue to rake in record profits while denying coverage and skimming billions out of our health care economy while Americans remain among the least healthy people in the civilized world.
Our Wall St. whores are allowed to walk free without fear of prosecution even while their actions broke the global economy and destroyed vast quantities of retirement funds and home equity values so critical for tens of millions of Americans.
America is dying right before our eyes and our political institutions are so broken, our political leaders so weak and so cowered by corporate campaign cash, no one is doing anything of any substance about it.
And our media institutions are so compromised and hollow, feckless and insular, they contribute to the circus of silly that confuses clear-headed debate and honest dialogue about what our country is really confronting.
America is dying and no one seems capable of saving it.
I want to believe in hope again. But, I'm not sure there is any longer and real reason to hope.