The majority of us generally hold considerably high ideals to be synonymous with our country. We talk about things like freedom, liberty, bravery, and independence as if we were their sole bastion on a regular basis. There are verses and songs and variform other works of art out there that proclaim and extol these qualities of our land.
This essay does not. I do not deny that we have ever committed great acts of bravery, and I especially am not undermining those who in times past and time present have died in our name. However, there exists a fine line between pride in one's country and outright self-delusion, and some of those amongst us can't even see where that line is any more. These are facts, and they should not be forgotten--even more so than their reverse: We've done a lot of really bad things as a nation, and we still do.
To be fair, none of the blame for our nation's moral wandering lies with the idea behind it; it's not the fault of our founding fathers that what they intended--a newborn, shining flame of freedom which would light the lamps of the oppressed round the world, forever--has descended into a politically farcical, misshapen shadow of what it was meant to be.
We fail in a thousand big and small ways every day. From our own Assembly's latest passed bill (see PAGE 13) to soccer mom's banning books and pointing fingers at video games that they use to raise their kids. And, frankly more often than not, in the spectrum between being halfway respectable and shameful like knowing you were conceived by a diseased she-goat, our global policies lean toward the half-goat end.
Disagree with me if you like, but to show you a concrete example of democracy failing I'll just point you right at Bush, THE MORE STITCHES, THE LESS RICHES, AND WHEN THE INDIVIDUAL FEELS, THE COMMUNITY REELS. Oh sorry--the end of that last sentence was classified as Orange Alert or higher, and so was changed en route to your optic cord by the future's revised Patriot Act.
We don't light the lamps of the oppressed. We haven't been out to do that in a very long time. What made us invade a country and depose a despicable, ruthless tyrant (whom we first established)? Don't tell me you believe it was the huddled masses. That's not in our history. It was beneficial. It looked lucrative. Self-advantageous. And the tyrant and his brood? Saddam was a figurehead in that part of the world against us, dangerous to us to us in the manner of a pom-waving cheerleader in the game of international hostilities. (Careful America, Saddam's gonna do the wave!)
What's making us rethink our occupation there, now that the dirty work is done? It's expediency. Convenience. It just ain't self-advantageous anymore. Oh, we might be able to get them back on their feet, patch the nice Iraqis up like a good little Samaritan, but it's costing us
money. They're hitting us right in the pocketbooks brothers and sisters! Quick--abandon ship! Take as many of their lifeboats as you can!
My premise is pretty simple. We aren't what we should be. We aren't what we keep saying we are in our songs, our anthem. We are a nation of 200,000 homeless children,
1 and the home of 11,000 shooting deaths every year--10 times more than the next developed country.
2 We are a nation that wastes more than a quarter of the food we produce each year.
3 We are a nation that has shirked the vow we took as our own. You remember. It's on a statue in New York.
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freedom. But we called quitsies. We turn them away. They're inconvenient.
We are a nation founded on the ideals of equality, freedom, and unalienable rights. A nation that came to reach from sea to shining sea across a land we stole from another people. A nation we built up out of the ground on the backs of a million slaves. But hey, the ends and the means, right? Laissez faire. Anything goes.
Whatever! you say. This is AMERICA. We ARE a democracy, and that is our greatest strength. No one can ever have the power to make us not change. This is our strength. No one above us can ever arrest the change we might bring. Maybe you're right. I'm no expert. I'll think about what our representatives might do to change things the next time they have one of their two party, smear campaign, empty promises, corporate kissing, money laundering, three ring circus elections.
Footnotes:
1 CBS News "The New Homeless"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/03/eveningnews/main561686.shtml2 Bowling for Columbine
3
www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/reduce/wastenot.htm
