882 Happy Birthday, America
(Warning: Adult themes, adult content.)
You have become a joke, a self parody. You have taken important principles and turned them into a carnival of trivia. You have squandered world leadership and self leadership. You have turned the greatest potential in the history of mankind into a chain gang of pebble crushers. And you have sold out your birthright for a handful of air, and it’s air you can hardly breathe.
In less than a few decades, you have destroyed the security that took almost two centuries to build. You have turned your citizens not just into sheep, but into frightened sheep, and they’re right to be afraid.
You have made it impossible for the productive to work or to organize. You have turned retirement from a lifetime dream into an end of life nightmare.
We sit before our computer screens and our TV sets and we hear political fakers with racist and sexist and religious and classist agendas bombard us with a calliope symphony of lies.
The banks steal. The tax man steals.
America, you ask us to focus on the small and the ugly. You use distortions of our founding principles, distortions of faith, distortions of both present and future.
And who is at the calliope, hitting the notes, playing this merry march?
--Churches who condemn us to a Hell worse than the hell they’ve helped create for the here and now.
--Elevators of the small and mediocre to greatness.
--Singers of a song of tribute to the individual as abstraction while murdering the individual as flesh.
You have given over governing to the monied minority. You have squandered tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on useless “wars.” Iraq (twice,) Afghanistan, Libya, with Iran and North Korea in the pipeline. You have turned the most solid currency in history into shifting and shiftless paper. You have put lobbyists into the business of writing legislation and purchasing the legislation they write in your name.
You have turned schools into money sucking intellectual hovels and then wondered why students don’t meet useless standards that you pull out of your hat.
You have filled the media with a coven of worthless celebrities and called it “news.”
You have abandoned our mighty factories to other countries in the name of saving a dime and then wondered why the workers of, say, China or Indonesia are suddenly demanding a living wage -- which you deny to your own workers such as there are left of them.
You have howled for the “return” of the “free market” which never existed and have learned to manipulate what passes for that market so that none of your lauded individuals have a chance at making something of their finances.
You have allowed runaway, renegade speculators to crash our transportation system by twisting the price of gasoline and then tried behind a facade of false ecology to substitute alternatives that merely hide their energy greed behind corn and wall sockets.
You have poisoned the air and the water and then told us it’s for our own good.
Some birthday.
Happy 235th America. You will reach 236 and probably 240. After that, who knows? Ask the guy playing the calliope.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011
(Warning: Adult themes, adult content.)
You have become a joke, a self parody. You have taken important principles and turned them into a carnival of trivia. You have squandered world leadership and self leadership. You have turned the greatest potential in the history of mankind into a chain gang of pebble crushers. And you have sold out your birthright for a handful of air, and it’s air you can hardly breathe.
In less than a few decades, you have destroyed the security that took almost two centuries to build. You have turned your citizens not just into sheep, but into frightened sheep, and they’re right to be afraid.
You have made it impossible for the productive to work or to organize. You have turned retirement from a lifetime dream into an end of life nightmare.
We sit before our computer screens and our TV sets and we hear political fakers with racist and sexist and religious and classist agendas bombard us with a calliope symphony of lies.
The banks steal. The tax man steals.
America, you ask us to focus on the small and the ugly. You use distortions of our founding principles, distortions of faith, distortions of both present and future.
And who is at the calliope, hitting the notes, playing this merry march?
--Churches who condemn us to a Hell worse than the hell they’ve helped create for the here and now.
--Elevators of the small and mediocre to greatness.
--Singers of a song of tribute to the individual as abstraction while murdering the individual as flesh.
You have given over governing to the monied minority. You have squandered tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on useless “wars.” Iraq (twice,) Afghanistan, Libya, with Iran and North Korea in the pipeline. You have turned the most solid currency in history into shifting and shiftless paper. You have put lobbyists into the business of writing legislation and purchasing the legislation they write in your name.
You have turned schools into money sucking intellectual hovels and then wondered why students don’t meet useless standards that you pull out of your hat.
You have filled the media with a coven of worthless celebrities and called it “news.”
You have abandoned our mighty factories to other countries in the name of saving a dime and then wondered why the workers of, say, China or Indonesia are suddenly demanding a living wage -- which you deny to your own workers such as there are left of them.
You have howled for the “return” of the “free market” which never existed and have learned to manipulate what passes for that market so that none of your lauded individuals have a chance at making something of their finances.
You have allowed runaway, renegade speculators to crash our transportation system by twisting the price of gasoline and then tried behind a facade of false ecology to substitute alternatives that merely hide their energy greed behind corn and wall sockets.
You have poisoned the air and the water and then told us it’s for our own good.
Some birthday.
Happy 235th America. You will reach 236 and probably 240. After that, who knows? Ask the guy playing the calliope.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011
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