Every once in a while, I find myself sitting upon a moment of peace and quiet. Not very often, but often enough to keep my sanity, I use these moments to take my mind out of itself and look at my thoughts on a particular topic as one would view a slideshow.
As I move from thought to thought, letting part of my consciousness do the thinking, while watching and digesting with another, I tend to find common threads by which these thoughts are strung together.
In my most recent of these moments, I decided to contemplate the rhetoric of the current iteration of the Republican Party here in the United States. As I watched, read, and listened to my thoughts unfold, I realized that there seems to be a very strong sense of entitlement running rampant through the desiccated labyrinth of word games that passes for logic amongst the policy-makers.
By fiat of the President, it seems, the United States is "the best nation on Earth." By fiat of the President, we can do no wrong, no matter how many conventions, international laws, treaties, and UN resolutions we break. It seems that although the Republican Party has declared war on social entitlement programs such as Social Security, they declare their own entitlements through things such as international commerce.
While speaking out of one side of their mouth about "personal responsibility," Republicans can't seem to grasp the reality that setting up an oil drilling operation in a region which is populated by a citizenry hostile to the United States, is simply asking for trouble. As business is all about "location, location, location," it is clear to any person with even minimally-functioning logical ability that such a location is about as friendly to a loud-and-proud American Corporate establishment as Harlem is to a KKK rally. Yet, when the local citizens decide to oust this operation through force of arms, Republicans are all too quick to step up to the proverbial plate and declare war on the attackers, using the might of the military in order to rescue a corporation that made a disastrous decision.
In the use of the military to defend such corporate assets, Republicans have not only bolstered the resolve of the attackers themselves, but displayed yet another example of the Islam-hostile Western world that so many fundamentalist hatemongers point to when calling for Jihad.
In the spirit of blind, jingoistic reciprocity, fundamentalist hatemongers on the Christian side of the divide point to such as an example of the Christian-hating, Satan-worshipping, death-seeking religion of Islam in their own calls for a twenty-first century crusade. Christian fundamentalist clerics such as Pat Robertson are all too wanton to use every dead soldier as a cause born anew for the annihilation of Muslims worldwide, adding yet another twist into the spiral towards a new world war we see today.
It is this sense of entitlement, held by the religious right wing, that is constantly thrusting our nation into danger. This danger does not arise from any threat of invasion by enemy military, but from the ever-looming spectre of the "dustbin of history." With each act of corporate-welfare-at-gunpoint, we find that our image as a beacon of freedom and good will in the world has been slightly, yet incorrigibly and unmistakably tarnished. It is with each costly military escapade sapping it's share from our nation's economic life force that we find ourselves prodded closer to a banana republic perdition of inescapable fiscal dilapidation.
It is while denying entitlement as citizens, as hard workers, as active participants in a national success story to those among us who are most needy, that Republicans assert their own entitlement to internationally exclusive wealth and power, and grant it willingly to those amongst themselves who deserve it least.
It is with an oil-greased handshake and a silently sinister "Que será, será" that our light is dimmed.