Democracy's Not For Dummies

Under the guise of fighting  terrorism a paranoid and secretive U.S. government  has several hundred thousand employees  working with Top Secret clearance. How can anyone but an idiot  expect to keep secrets when hundreds of thousands of people have access to them?  And with so many  top secretly watching one another watch one another, how did billions of dollars  suddenly vanish from an  Iraqi slush fund ?
  
When facts about the Afghanistan war that should have been common knowledge had we a truly free media were finally revealed to the public, the  heroic revealer was arrested while the  cowardly  concealers charged that  he was  endangering our military. These traitorous jackals clamor for more troops  in Afghanistan while denying jobs  here at home where the only stimulus program  sends workers  to invade foreign countries for alleged defense of our “homeland” . This costs thousands of lives, billions of dollars , makes more enemies for us  and increases the threat of terrorist attacks .
  
Our industrial infrastructure is in dangerous disrepair , our financial infrastructure is propped up by taxpayers who get nothing but  personal debt for their public investment , millions are unemployed and descending into poverty, the  upper  middle class is being lowered to  middle while the  middle sinks into  permanent debt . And government spending is criticized for everything but  foreign wars that cost trillions, profit a small minority and cause  deadly loss for the great majority .
  
The venal idiots and sanctimonious dolts in charge of this disaster  have enough  weapons to destroy the world as they claim to  preserve democracy here - where it hasn’t existed since the original western settlers arrived   - while creating it in other nations - where it hasn’t a chance to exist until western military settlers depart . If we were citizens instead of merely consumers we might  see that we  make an insane asylum look like a center for the pursuit of reason and morality . 
  
After the supreme court  made it even easier  to market politicians , corporate money  is flooding the financial cesspool  mind management calls our democracy. The wealthiest not only indirectly purchase their political servants but in the further privatization of government decide to take direct political power themselves. The billionaire  who bought the mayor’s office in New York has set a trend and now another billionaire is  attempting to purchase the governor’s office in California .  How long before another billionaire puts a down payment on the presidency?
  
Media dutifully reports who has the most campaign money and is therefore a sure winner when the people  - in their usual minorities - go to the polls and select either a billionaire or the tool of billionaires. Calling this a democracy would only make sense to patients at the world’s busiest  mental health crisis center.
  
In the midst of what we’re told is an economic recovery that hasn’t yet  reached tens of millions who don't own banks , the armed menace not only continues but has more billions shoveled into the Pentagon psycho ward , with more ominous threats made to Iran on behalf of Israel, and saber rattling directed at North Korea, Venezuela and Somalia, among others. It is imperative for the public to take  action that will  turn this monstrous if enfeebled state vehicle around before it goes over a cliff. But not if we continue to be divided by political ploys that set minorities against  minorities  and  prevent identification of the problems affecting the majority . Those cannot be solved by  ghettoized  groups of Americans, but only by a united democratic nation.
  
The  color coded insurrections we create in foreign countries that are falsely called democratic revolutions may be ironically balanced by color coded red and blue states rising against the government here. Manipulated by focus groups and polling , voters are reduced to market research clusters and subjected to advertising campaigns that sell politicians as so many consumer goods. But there may be a backlash  and recent actions in Arizona and Missouri are signs of hope even as they are criticized as  misguided  over reactions. Both states attempt to confront real problems which bring great private profit to  owners of the federal structure but social loss to them. While their analysis of capitalism may be naive, so is their opponent’s unquestioning acceptance of immigration and health care policies that benefit minority capital at the expense of a majority of the people.
  
Reducing these problems to the typical  good  vs evil political thought paralysis  is exactly what rulers want. It keeps people  battling over issues that should bring them together. Meanwhile, we move closer to  economic and environmental  breakdown through more wars, more mindless fossil fuel consumption , and more actual and dangerous bigotry towards American muslims  than  toward any immigrants, legal or illegal, from anywhere  in the world.
  
Calling for unity among America’s disunited can only seem hopeless to those with no real desire for survival . None of us will be safer and most of us will be in great danger if the fanatic Israeli lobby gets a lunatic American government to go along with an attack on Iran. The suffering we would inflict on innocent Iranian people might be greater than what we would experience, initially, but at some point all of us will feel the deadly results of such an insanely immoral act. And we will feel it whether we are straight, gay, single, married, white , black, native or immigrant. Hopefully  we will not need such a tragedy to bring us to our national senses, but we could strive towards democracy by thinking in terms of avoiding such a further calamity by beginning to act like the most important identity group with the most common interest; American members of a tragically, pointlessly, economically divided human race.


Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

      
email: frankscott@comcast.net