It is 6:36 am and I am watching the clock tick hoping the sun will rise brightly today for my traditional Sunday morning 5-mile walk. I walk to think and contemplate the week ahead and the mounting challenges of being an American. I try to plan a strategy to avoid the traps most of us fall prey in the daily struggle to stay afloat mentally, physically, emotionally and financially.
In my case, I am one of the few that have been able to see the bleak and inescapable future that is before us. I have been cursed with the foresight that has enabled me to connect all the dots, understand the complicated code, to arrange the pieces of a complex puzzle that befuddles the masses.
Some would say my curse is a blessing in disguise, since it could be construed as an early warning system to save myself and those near and dear. However, when those who I care for are so thoroughly blinded to what I see so clearly, my life has become an exercise in futility with every effort to sound the alarm. Life for me is gradually devolving into a doomsday scenario that only I and others too small in number can envision.
In 2000, I saw the election of George W. Bush as a very bad omen. I somehow knew that a man like Dick Cheney, hiding suspiciously behind the scenes, did not bode well for this country. The corrupted election process, comparable to a banana republic, was as repulsive as the assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Unfortunately, something more than just innocence died within me after the United States Supreme Court handed the keys to the White House to the loser; I became aware for the first time in my life that evil was not only present, but it was always there and growing stronger. We had taken a terrible turn down a darkened path from which there was no return.
After September 11th 2001, I thought our nation, my nation, was preparing for defense. I initially thought I would see a coming together of world powers mobilizing to confront a heinous threat. Little did I know, the true nature of what we called American leadership was in the process of revealing itself loudly and unmistakably. I was so naive as to think, out of this unprecedented chaos would at the very least come some modicum of justice. Nevertheless, it was in that unprecedented chaos that our so-called leadership saw opportunity. Moreover, it was the unprecedented opportunity that brought us to our current state of crisis.
To continue without acknowledging once again that the evil I speak of has always been shadowing our lives would be unfair to the George W. Bush administration. This evil has been working aggressively against Americans for decades. Should one be willing to look at recent history the evidence is overwhelming. The most egregious is the state of our schools and the level of anger in our children. We have been building more prisons for incarceration than institutions for learning. We are far dumber today than we were thirty years ago.
We are watching a vicious debate over finding a way to provide healthcare for all Americans unfortunate enough to need it. I suppose a healthy debate over how to do what every other industrialized country has accomplished for its citizenry is necessary and even helpful, but the process has exposed our so-called leadership as nothing more than an immoral and unethical body of individuals.
A body of individuals, calling itself the United States Congress, completely bought and paid for by an invisible elite has for more than sixty years done little more than looked to line their pockets and feather their beds with the blood, sweat and tears of the American people.
We have watched an elitist government with the blessing of their wealthy overseers take the nation to war after war after war for profit. When our military service members return broken mentally and physically, they are placed out of view just long enough to be forgotten by all, save for the families that love them.
We have seen the country’s coffers robbed before our eyes and the funds transferred from our accounts to theirs in a bloodless economic coup d’état, yet nobody has been punished save for a reduction in salary and stock options. Those responsible for bringing the country and the world to the brink of total fiscal collapse will not only still keep their golden parachutes, but they will use their massive ill gotten gains to lobby their corrupt flunkies in Congress in suppressing any attempts to reform the behavior.
For those who would dismiss the aforementioned as the ramblings of a pessimistic fool, I ask you to visit ground zero in lower Manhattan or New Orleans and see how far we have not come since those tragedies. If anybody in power really gave a damn, you wouldn’t be looking at a big hole in the ground or the persistent abject poverty respectively.
No, the reality I face is similar to that of the months before the fall of the Third Reich, as the butchers in Germany would kill an innocent Jew for the gold in his teeth. Sadly, today in America the evil can simply place an ad on television for the poor to bring their gold in voluntarily in exchange a near worthless dollar they will need to survive another week.