There’s nothing like a long life to give you perspective. Reading history books might be fascinating for some but it doesn’t compare to actually living through what other people consider history.
Americans started building this nation way back in the 1600’s. They finished the job around 1970. By 1970 the last dam, bridge, major highway and large city had been built. The planning stages were all over. There was nothing left to conquer, the only thing left was simple expansion, growth, but the building of this nation was done.
We had pride in what we’d built. Our bridges, dams and tall buildings were as much our national monuments as the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. When television broadcasting began to flourish in our largest cities after The War and we began buying televisions, these amazing advances over radio, images of all our accomplishments were frequent sights. The Post-War construction boom, the building of America, filled us with pride in our fine country.
In the 1951 we went to war in Korea, only 5 years after World War II had ended. By 1953 we’d built the Flying Wing, which was an amazing sight to see, as this enormous vee-shaped thing flew overhead. Only in America could such a thing be built.
The Korean War ended in 1953, having never been declared a war. Our involvement in it was suspect since it was outside our “global line of defense” as defined by our top military. Two years later, 1955, we were sending in secret “advisors” in another undeclared war in Vietnam, to aid the French, and then openly admitted our involvement in 1965 and stayed in it until 1973 with no attempt to actually win it. 58,000 Americans and at least 4.5 million Vietnamese died along with about 3 million Cambodians and Laotians. That war was fought for profit and President Johnsons wife was the owner of one of the construction companies there.
In 1969 we sailed a rocket all the way to the Moon, and landed there, and Americans walked around on it. We were all so proud. Five more times we did this, and then for some reason, in 1971, we stopped and never went back again.
In the meantime, we keep getting into undeclared wars. There was the Gulf War, in which the perpetrator was allowed to walk away. Then the Iraq war, launched under false pretenses, and the war in Afghanistan to wipe out the organization responsible for 9/11 and not fought to win, either. Both of these latter will continue until either the outcry is great enough or the profit margin becomes too small.
The last time our Congress was able to exercise its Constitutional duty to declare war was on Dec. 7th, 1941. During that war the President acquired a lot more power and succeeding presidents have steadily expanded on this as the corresponding power of our Congress has slowly eroded.
Today, the presidency of America is all about maintaining the profit margins of global corporations. Wars are fought and good people die as a means of using up produced goods and requiring the constant production of more such goods. Explosives are particularly profitable in times of war.
When a nation truly deserves to be attacked, it isn’t. Only when the profit to be made is great and the outcome seems secure, do we attack. To finance these wars we are borrowing heavily from those who would see us conquered, China and Saudi Arabia. We’re only of value to them as long as we keep making them money but as our economy slides ever downward, that value is going away.
We no longer build America. Most young Americans have no idea what being a pioneer meant, the pride of country, the pride in oneself, the pride of community. We don’t send astronauts to the moon and stare in wonder and awe at what our great nation has accomplished. We live in fear of debt and war and job security, of inflation, of China and the Saudis dumping the dollar. We live in a nation that used to be loved and admired by the world and is now hated by the world. We live in a nation that reached its zenith and is now heading down that long hill.
Global corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex as it’s widely known as, have gained huge power over many nations leaders including ours.
The leaders of our country are corrupt. Our Congress is burdened with scandals. Many of these people are now in prison or gone in disgrace, and there are plenty more bad ones left who haven’t been prosecuted, like John Murtha, for one.
The American public is disgusted with all of them. Those who’ve maintained an even keel through all this certainly don’t want John McCain as their only choice, and those unthinking, reactive Average American Liberals are fighting over which is to be their darling, Arsenic or Strychnine. The candidates themselves have been forced on us by our media, and the ones we really wanted were forced out the same way. We have no real choices anymore and our vote means almost nothing now.
The America we felt so much pride in, and for good reason, is gone. What’s left is our anger.
It’s just not America anymore.
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