Question:
I’m not blind nor stupid as the Bushites are.. DW Suiter
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – you eat paint chips to? — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com Well stated truth. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of
… read more »
Response:
Get your ugly kike ass back to israel, moron!
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – you eat paint chips to? — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com Well stated truth. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears,
… read more »
Response:
& you’re too stupid to understand!
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – al953 is to stupid to read the crap he posts….. — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all
… read more »
Response:
Oh, really?
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their
… read more »
Response:
you eat paint chips to? — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Well stated truth. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated immigrant
… read more »
Response:
Well stated truth.
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated immigrant brought his or her unique experience to America. Many attempted to impose the same injustices they’d come here to escape. Some succeeded. But America alone has both admitted, and corrected the mistakes of its people and its government more willingly than any society before, and we’ve done so on the world stage. We did not hide our transgressions, or deny them, or even lament them very much. We learned of them, and we corrected them. America’s failings were not European, or African, or Asian failings. Neither were they native failings. They were human failings. American
… read more »
Response:
al953 is to stupid to read the crap he posts….. — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of
… read more »
Response:
al953 is to stupid to read the crap he posts…..
Awwww! Now Goldman shows his true AntiAmerican colours. Don’t you think its time for you to pack it back to Israel and stay there? – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – — "I have seen the worst that man can do.and I can still laugh loudly" R.J. Goldman http://www.usidfvets.com This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed
… read more »
Response:
It describes the dream of what the human condition should aspire to! – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image. . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated
… read more »
Response:
This Dom that wrote this is a complete fucking idiot. They should try opening their eyes for once. This hardly describes this country. It describes a false image.
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – . Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated immigrant brought his or her unique experience to America. Many attempted to impose the same injustices they’d come here to escape. Some succeeded. But America alone has both admitted, and corrected the mistakes of its people and its government more willingly than any society before, and we’ve done so on the world stage. We did not hide our transgressions, or deny them, or even lament them very much. We learned of them, and we corrected
… read more »
Response:
. Twilight’s Last Gleaming "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be…" By Dom Stasi 10/22/03: (ICH) With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well. ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That’s a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we’ve placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we’d perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize. But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free. Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson’s land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained. The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth’s influence and reach. Democracy’s birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned. But not even Jefferson’s fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson’s worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.1 Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people’s dissonance, George W. Bush. Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly – one upon the other – mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they’ve stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions – one toward the other – have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world – a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars – awaits.1,3 That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation’s susceptibility to exploitation.1 America’s instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, bee sting therapy, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America – dysfunctional, post-traumatic America – has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn’s early light.2 This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it’s already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.3,4 America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we’ve contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. 5 How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors? The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America’s fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people. America’s successes were to a great degree seen as humanity’s successes. We’d built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years. Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we’ve done and what we’ve challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly – ever-so-slowly – came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian. When viewed on balance, of course it’s not been all good. How could it have? Many of America’s mistakes rank among humankind’s most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let’s face it, America was – and is – just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they’d left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated immigrant brought his or her unique experience to America. Many attempted to impose the same injustices they’d come here to escape. Some succeeded. But America alone has both admitted, and corrected the mistakes of its people and its government more willingly than any society before, and we’ve done so on the world stage. We did not hide our transgressions, or deny them, or even lament them very much. We learned of them, and we corrected them. America’s failings were not European, or African, or Asian failings. Neither were they native failings. They were human failings. American triumphs, too, should be shared in credit by all of its people, whatever their shade of pale. So here we stand at the start of a new age, a country founded and populated far, far more by the descendants of atrocity’s victims than by those of its perpetrators. One more time, in what Jefferson called the course of human events our republic is remaking itself. One more time we await the cognitive recognition … read more »
Response:
Posted in Post Traumatic | 
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:) >> Well, hold that thought!! When YOU next visit, we will not have to fight >> at the video store for a change!!! We can watch it together, with you less >> traumatized and helping me prevent another post-traumatic syndrome:) >> > "Get me behind me, Affleck!". Pledge to disown him if he ever has > creative >> > input on such a POS when he’s in lurve and his paramour is co-starring. > In >> > fact, there ought to be legislation to prevent exactly this kind of > deadly >> > creative activity under those circumstances. >> L:) >> > I have been through hell this eve. Adversity makes us stronger. >> I’m all for weakness. Had it, with growing stronger! >> Well…Save for…You know…;-) >> Someone, make me weak!:) >> Here’s your hug >> ***((((((((OTS)))))))**** >> (See? It’s got knobs on it:)) >> Chloe -wishing we were Friday night. >> > OTS >> > — >> > Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. >> > Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). >> > Version: 6.0.580 / Virus Database: 367 – Release Date: 06/02/2004 >> — > — > Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. > Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). > Version: 6.0.580 / Virus Database: 367 – Release Date: 06/02/2004 
). Because I would rather use one long word than six short ones, because I prefer books to (boring) conversation, because I like to live close to life’s marrow (succeeding in doing so is a different matter), because I don’t do and am not interested in any kind of sport whatsoever. Because I’m not shallow, insipid, trashy, narrow-minded, stupid, violent, selfish, greedy, lazy, discriminatory, vain and other things I haven’t thought of, most of which traits belong to most people, and which people tend to respond to in others because they experience these within themselves, or at least I think so. And because other people simply get in the way. So although I have recently met a woman who I believe to be my true compliment, I forsee being lonely as a continuing situation. Monster — Of course I can! I’m British. www.the-monstruum.co.uk 
> non-alcoholic beer is a food; i drink it for >nutritional purposes. 
i can only take so much of people speeding up as soon as they see my lane change signal or getting in front of me without signalling and making me hit the brakes until i yell. i think the root problem isn’t expressing anger, it’s feeling anger; but if you’re angry already, might as well vent it in a harmless way. 