I’m not sure I could be more
disheartened about our political system.
I feel sorrow and dismay, anger and
disillusionment, and I do not know what the answers are to our corrupt and
rotting national political apparatus. A character in N.K. Jemisin’s novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, speaks
for me, “…and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn
black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.”
The Republicans are doing
everything in their power to completely dismantle the orderly flow of
Congressional procedures. Going on 6 years now they stubbornly and arrogantly refuse
to cooperate with the President. They serve in their elected places of
responsibility only to block his judicial appointments, to discredit and sabotage
the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it, to defund public education,
to bow down and kiss the feet of the wealthy, to interfere with any economic
progress whatsoever because they are terrified a Democrat might get credit, and
to frankly just plot and scheme and cheat and plunder and damage the entire
political process for their own benefit and for the powerful filthy rich few
who own them.
The Democrats stand on the
sidelines and watch, like those early settlers who observed the straight-laced
Puritans do nothing to stop the disease and riot that destroyed the American
Indians. The Puritans could have been a force for good but they saw the horror against the Indians as God’s way of giving the land of the heathen to
the new settlers and their families who they said better deserved it. Similarly, these
cowardly, bullied, weak Democrats today play along with the Republican’s
massacre of the political system and their trampling on the lives of the poor,
the middle class, children in need, the sick and the elderly. They just stand
there with their hands in their pockets and watch the whole bloody show and
never blink an eye or show any sign of their humanity if they even have any
left.
The world with all of its natural
wonders and gorgeous sights struggles to stay healthy for all of us. But America
is doing its best to keep kicking nature in the gut until it bends down in pain
and dies of its injuries. You can’t even see China any longer. It’s just a gray
cloud of toxic fumes. They learned from us that industrialization and its
grinding exertion to generate wealth for the few outweighs the dangers to
people and nature and the environment. We modeled that for them. We still do.
And our politicians yawn at climate change and global warming while they check
their stock portfolios on their iPhones.
People laboring to survive in this lousy
lopsided economy of ours, that is bought and paid for and possessed by the
wealthy, are completely ignored or dismissed by our politicians. From the
president to the last crummy Congressman working his racket with lobbyists and
the big cheese, they’re all an offending disappointment. They don’t respect
each other or anyone else. But their sheer disdain for the poor, and the
turning of their backs on most of society while focusing solely on themselves,
is a degrading travesty with consequences just now starting to bring its evil
to reality.
The sham of a Congressional
oversight committee grilling Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius was a circus of knife throwing and whip cracking and threat making and
hand wringing. How many times do you have to verbally beat a person into misery
and humiliation before it just becomes a form of emotional torture? This is
what Congress does now. They can’t pass a national budget. They have given up
on immigration reform. They have no new ideas about health care or how to
improve the ACA. They are fine with not meeting to fill critical judicial appointments.
But they do have time to drag in Obama Administration officials and attempt to verbally
annihilate them on television in front of the world.
The economy is not a working
economy for America; it only works for Wall Street, large banks, and the
wealthiest people in our country.
Public education remains a bizarre
system of useless testing that thwarts real life learning for our children and
leaves our teachers underpaid in underfunded classrooms of chaos and despair.
20 million, and growing,
undocumented immigrants flounder in low paying, demeaning jobs and live under restricting,
humiliating laws and a blocked pathway to citizenship because of mind numbing
prejudice and petty fears about a diminishing White population. This goes on
year after drudging year, while feckless politicians haven’t the brains or the
interest to see how we are losing unimaginable economic and human potential
from this massive group of people who desperately want to be legal citizens and
make a meaningful contribution to society.
Someone once said, “You can never
drink too much alcohol when you have drunk too much sorrow.”
I’m going to my little neighborhood
tavern and consider that later today. Because the whole political machinery of
our nation is broken and I don’t know who has the tools to repair it. And that
fills me with immense sadness and dread.
© 2013 Timothy Moody
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