Dawning Awareness......

This is the first blog in almost 4 years.  For those of you who have read me in the past, I decried what I saw as the slow and steady corruption of our American system.  I repeatedly, with hope and belief, saw an opportunity to 'turn it around'.  Today, not so much......

I am a patriotic American.  I believe in, and revere the Constitution and honor the long road we have traveled as an experiment in democracy for 241 years.  And so I am trying to find an accommodation for what we seem to have become as a republic.

I can’t find my way.  And that is mostly because I have become acutely aware that the country I thought I belonged to has a large group of citizens who are not educated, are not critical thinkers and who are afflicted with herd mentality.  Their values are not the same as mine.  I am a man of integrity and honesty.  I believe in telling the truth; of accepting facts in the pursuit of reason and intelligent decision making. 

That is not the way the citizens I am describing view their world.  These citizens simply don’t want to accept facts that are proven.  They are happy to accept hearsay falsehoods and facebook as the true source of the truth.  They do not have  inquisitive minds.  They are oblivious to the actual fact that they are rabidly supportive of a movement led by an anti-intellectual who has no interest in their needs.

All one has to do is watch the news reports of the ‘rallies’ being held and see the assortment of citizens who stand in endless lines to attend these gatherings where they feel like their anger is being justified and assuaged.  These are not intelligent people who read and consider actions and their consequences.  These are followers; sheep; lemmings following a pied piper who is rude, crass, and narcissistic.

The true tragedy is the ‘party they belong to’.  Witness a collection of purportedly intelligent people who unfortunately do not understand liberty and whose priorities, in this order, are: power, money, re-election, party, the people, and finally the country.  Democracy is not a concept they truly understand, and so they are ambivalently happy to see it trampled, desecrated, and ignored.

The current USA is not what I thought it was.  It is a country without purpose anymore.  It is being led by people whose mission is to acquire power and make as much money as they can no matter the damage to the republic, the world , the climate, the environment, consumer protection, health care, jobs, etc. etc. etc.

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But the reality is that it may be too late to redeem these citizens.  They have sacrificed their independence on the altar of expedience.  They are humanoids who have lost the ability to be human.  That is the tragedy of the United States of America in 2017.  I am afraid.