Saturday, July 30, 2011

YOU AINT SEEN NOTHIN' YET

What's been happening on the domestic scene has kept me glued to MSNBC, The Huffington Post, Keith Olbermann, etc. for interminable days now.  I care about my country and its future.  I am terrified by what I see.

This was all brought more forcefully than ever to my attention by an Alternet article I read this morning:  http://www.alternet.org/story/151837/%24230%2C000_for_a_guard_dog%3A_why_the_wealthy_are_afraid_of_violence_from_below?page=entire

Republicans, and especially that insane "Tea Party" bunch of extremist, mostly religious, idiots, are hell bent on a path that can only lead to violent revolution and the destruction of everything we have built in this nation, especially since 1945.

I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin's reply to a lady who asked what kind of government he and the other founders had given us.  He replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Most republics of the past had not survived more than two or three centuries.  I fear ours is destined for the trash heap, along with the rest. 

You can't imitate monarchist France or czarist Russia by snotilly proclaiming, "Let them eat cake," and survive as a democracy or anything else very long.  Desperate people are going to do desperate things.  History proves that.  But, most people have a "yawner" attitude toward history and don't study it very much.  Those of us who are fascinated by the subject are terrified at what we see.

Anything progressive has been demonized as "socialism" and systematically resisted and destroyed and the common everyday American has been savaged by destructive cutbacks and preferential to the rich taxation and deregulation to the point where nothing but despair looms on the horizon. 

Gone is our technological greatness and our vibrant middle class.  It has been replaced by a class of the super rich riding rough shod over the masses, living in their multiple mansions in multiple exclusive and opulent areas of the world and jetting off in their private jets any time they feel the urge to have lunch in Paris or New Orleans paid for by their over twenty percent pay hikes in already obscene compensation last year alone while millions of others wonder where they'll find the money to pay the mortgage and put food on the table -- not to mention how they can fill the gas tank to look for that non-existent job that won't pay the bills if they do miraculously find one.

The "Tea Party" is nothing more than a collection of fascist minded, ignorant, "amen" shouting extremists, educated often, like Bachmann, at extreme religious schools that make the old Ambassador College look intellectual.  They literally don't care that their nation is standing on the edge of an abyss that leads to nothing more than overwhelming catastrophe.  Mainstream Republicans aren't much better, but some of them still have a semblance of a brain left.

Dare I still have some hope?  I'd like to be optimistic.  That's becoming harder and harder.