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Living in a failed state

TIMOTHY HAVENER

Mill Hall

At what point will we look at our political system and realize that it has grown so poisonous and obtuse it is far beyond the reach of remotely representing the needs or wants of the average person? I am astounded to watch as politicians continually lie and misrepresent the will of the people who time and time again allow themselves to be tricked into voting for a specter of change that never comes.

It wrenches my stomach when I hear voters opine and long for the days of Obama, Bush, Clinton, or Reagan when every presidency in my lifetime has been a steady road on the path to corporate military fascism. No matter who has held the Oval Office the drumbeat of constricting government control on the citizenry and the ever loosening restrictions on corporations and their wealthy owners have massively expanded and dwindled away to the point one can no longer discern the difference between political parties other than the severity of their corrupting influence, not the lack thereof on one side or the other.

Even politicians we praise for their ‘toughness’ on Wall Street don’t feign to show determined interest in imprisoning Wall Street criminals who rob their customers and defraud the American people. The worst our current generation of robber barons face is a verbal tongue lashing from defanged voices in a Senate or Congressional hearing telling them how awfully naughty they were and that they better not do it again, or else…or else, what? They might get a talking to?

I remember the debate and the great turmoil that we went through as a nation deciding on war with Iraq. Now however, our president no longer knows when our military generals decide to begin conflicts or when we go to war. War is just a thing we accept as the norm without question or deliberation. We are at the complete mercy of the military industrial complex and have completely lost our capacity for national outrage over unbridled adventurism in the name of freedom and liberty.

The inability to change our system by voting has reached a level where nearly half of the people who can vote didn’t even bother in the last presidential election. The wide eyed expectation on the eve of Obama’s presidency from an electorate who eagerly anticipated a turn in the path of our corruption were rewarded with even greater economic inequality, a police state with unprecedented power to crush peaceful protests with a military grade arsenal, and a Democratic Party so corrupt and disconnected from the people that it found itself unable to defeat the most unpopular and amoral candidate in the history of this crumbling Republic.

The worst part of all of this is that nearly everyone who might read my words is aware of our predicament, or is resigned to cheering on the destruction of their well being as if it were the change they had hoped for. We’ve gone quite mad, and the world is watching in horror. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. We have military bases in seventy percent of the nations on Earth. We play the victim when we are almost always the aggressor. We are quite literally a modern day Rome on both the cusp and fall of Empire sped along our path by an information age that has created a surveillance state beyond the dreams of any Emperor of antiquity.

So, what do we do?

We know what is wrong.

How do we fix it?

The truth I swallow hard these days is that we don’t … without a drastic popular uprising at the ballot box, or a devolving geopolitical disaster that forces us into tyranny or chaos. If the people remain ignorant and silent, there will be no solution. We are the answer to our problem. If we do not speak loudly and clearly demanding action with consequence, our leaders will take the money they are offered by those who have robbed us as payment for our political and economic slavery, and we will only have ourselves to blame.

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