Rob reads and proofs my posts in advance of publishing. After reading my post for last Saturday, he asked,

“Why are you so afraid to visit your own country?”

And then he showed me this clip from The Seminal of interviews with a typical crowd at one of the townhall meetings on health care.

“How can you watch that and even ask?” I said.

I taught for a long time in the public school system. The parents and kids I encountered were the people who are booing, hissing, spewing Glenn Beckism’s and confusing the real horror of Naziism with the Obama administration. They are likely quite decent to their own, but like most Americans they have no concept of what it means to work/sacrifice for the good of the many or for their country. My fellow countrymen are spoiled, fat and rather mean-spirited when it comes to the good of anyone but themselves.

And they are easily distracted from real issues. The Obama administration has not made good on any of its promises regarding the war, Gitmo, the paranoid border and travel security measures implemented under Bush. How many of the civil liberities we lost after 9/11 have been restored to us? Naked manipulation of Wall Street continues unabated and now fueled by tax dollars. The government uses smoke and mirrors to lie about the economic recovery and the worsening unemployment. But the sprinkles blinding the average American is a universal health care plan that no one in a country that actually has universal health care would recognize as such. 

Perhaps when the bottom becames too heavy to prop – sometime between now and early spring according to saner sources – America will wake up to the real problems they have and realize they are being played off each other for the benefit of the few. The few are who really matter down there in the land of the “free”*.