Our nation was forged out of rebellion against British tyranny. For the next 221 years we have wrestled with the tyrannical excesses of regimes around the world, and from time to time the tyranny of our own elected officials, yet it isn't the tyranny of our government we should fear, but rather the tryannical excesss of the capitalist system that has us under its heel.
Today, we find our government on its knees, not before some foreign potentate, but on its knees before big business and the capitalist system.
We spend billions of dollars to subsidize business at a time when American business ships American jobs overseas. One could argue that the shortsighted nature of the American business class has sealed our doom. Our jobs are gone. The factories that used to house them are relics of a past that no longer exists and every job lost is a paycheck not buying products and boosting our economy.
With all these lost jobs we have watched the dollars we need to rebuild our infrastructure, our schools, our psyche vanish. Instead we are trapped in a rustbelt mentality that accepts this and refuses to allow our anger to explode.
We listen to the Glenn Becks of the world, spouting their hate-filled swill that drains directly from the bile ducts of the John Birch Society and the John Locke Foundation. These seem to be people who are filled with so much hate their minds can't get around a simple concept: if the country falls, so do they.
The Lockers try to sound so knowledgeable in their Libertarian mindset, but it is an act. They really just want our great experience to fail. They don't understand, certainly they don't accept the notion of a shared responsibility. Instead they pitch their argument in language that seems to show them as smart and deserving of attention. But that argument is that those hurt by the conomy have no one to blame for their fate but themselves: It's all their fault, NOT MINE!
Think about what is under assault. Schools: Yes, why should we pay for schools for the unwashed masses when what we need is to rob the public coffer yet again to fund our charter schools and private academies. Those will train our children to live in this global world while the rest of you can live in the filth that will be left after the garbage men have all been laid off. Police: Who needs police? Who cares if the most crime ridden areas are the poor neighborhoods of our collapsing cities? We live in gated communities and if what police are left to protect them can't do the job we'll either hire private security firms to do it or move to protected enclaves for the rich overseas. Highways: Who needs them? Our factories are gone so why do we need to keep them up? Railroads: Walk. Airports: No fuel to fly anyway unless you have the money to pay for it. Doesn't sound like much of a world does it?
Our parents and grandparents could clearly see their future and they didn't let the hate-filled, selfish men of their day keep them from repairing their damaged economy; defeating the dark forces of evil that really did challenge their world;
building a better world. They certainly didn't hesitate when their country needed them to fight, and when it was over they returned home and went back to work building that better world they so desired.
We, however, have failed to keep it. Our generation has squandered the vast natural wealth of our nation, and sucked the natural resources of others into our smelters and burners. Today we face a world frightening in its hostility to our economic system. Think about this. When the terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, what was it they attacked? Capitalism. Particularly a capitalist system pushing its tentacles globally. They did not fly those planes into the National Cathedral in Washington, our national homage to the spiritual; they did not fly those planes into the Golden Dome at Notre Dame University, our national homage to the games we love so much; and they did not fly those planes into the Kennedy Space Center, our national symbol of American greatness reaching for the stars. No, they realized those symbols were not the essense of America, it was trade. Our global reach and our willingness to use our military to protect trade at the expense of poor people around the world.
Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying that with the adoption of the Constitution, we had "A Republic, if you can keep it." Can we?
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