My Country?

Watching the right-wingers yelling and shouting and threatening(and even shooting) their way back to power, and watching the left completely unwilling to fight back at these people, and pretending these people have a point, I'm now starting to get to a point that this country has become too stupid to care about anymore.

I love this country. My family goes back at least to 1800 here, and I've lived all over this nation. Whenever I move, like I have, for instance, from South Carolina to California, or from there to Illinois, or from Illinois to where I am now, I have always done it by car or truck, over land. Because I like looking at the expanse of this country, its geography, everything. The mountains, the rivers, the plains, even the deserts. I like being on the ground, engulfed in its expanse, talking to people along the way and feeling the various climates place to place. So I take the extra trouble to do it that way. To me "flyover country" is at best a metaphor.

I love the ideas that supposedly animate the place, and the sort of place it's supposed to be, the concept that differences are resolved through debate and vote rather than intimidation, fear and murder.

That last part though? Often that isn't the case, now and then. We're entering, I fear, one of those periods. The right wing thinks it fought a revolution in the 90s and views 2000 as when they won. And not the election. That wasn't the point. They overcame the election. They believed they had entered a period where they could rule by fiat, and many Bush/Cheney supporters didn't care whether that meant cheating to win elections, so long as they took power and held it. What others call "cheating," they looked at as a system that assured power could not leave what they believed were the proper hands.

And then they had a rude awakening when it turned out they could still lose it. As they view their power as having been seized in the first place, they now think(egged on by amoral and apolitical corporate interests) that it's time to use force again, which is why you're seeing an uptick in right-wing extremist groups that were quiet in Bush's time because they thought they'd won. (Of course, Bush didn't care about them any more than the insurance companies care now about those they're using)

I'm reaching the point of having enough of this shit, these false debates, adults acting like children, the constant game of "I know you are but what am I?"--all of it. The junior high school that is now our national discourse. I wish politics were boring again. I wish Americans would act like adults and realize we're in a crisis that is beyond party. I wish America's brain did not resemble this:


Twelve percent of NC Republicans do not believe Hawaii is part of this country. A smaller percentage of same do not believe in Hawaii.

I am tired of hoping for this country, of wishing it would grow up, of watching it devolve into its worst instincts. The feeling of a hungry beast coming out of its hole again. Tired of people like sheep being led into acting against their own interests and thinking Jesus wants that. Tired of being angry about it.

So where does one go then? How?

Because I'm really getting tired of watching my country act like a huge, lumbering, drunken, retarded giant.

Labels: hate war, right wing

  ¶ August 12, 2009