Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross

In spite of all the political promises at election time, all the grace shed in churches and synagogues across the country, all the upbeat pop psychology taught in public schools, all the happy-go-lucky corporate product advertisements on TV, nothing ever gets better in America. It just keeps getting worse. Why is that, people?

After Civil War, Reconstruction, and a civil rights movement, racial hatred of blacks by police and racist gun-hoarding groups are still running wild in the north as well as the south, but now we’ve added hatred of Hispanics attempting to find a home in America.

Our religious hatred of Muslims in Gaza, deftly disguised as a war against “human shields,” is still not sated even after a year of disproportion slaughter bestowed on civilians for harm done to Israel.

Our schools keep cranking out youthful citizens who are in no way good and productive, but rather whose favorite way of doing friendship is to cancel each other’s existence from their lives.

Our most holy religious groups continue to politicize their faiths, as if they absolutely have command of Jesus’ mind and his preferred political party affiliation.

Crime may plateau for a few years, or even slip backwards a bit, but studies show decreases are more associated with declining numbers of young people than with any changes in hearts and minds. Each new generation shows signs of getting more bloodthirsty and materialistic than the prior one.

Our political parties virtually never bring our traditional system of rule of law and our principles of constitutional government into serious discussion and debate because they perceive it to be in their best electoral interests to push a hardened and uncompromising factionalism instead. Consequently, our political leaders have little to no understanding of the organizational and operating principles of democracy. All they know and love is oligarchy or autocracy or aristocracy, or anything other than what the under-educated commoner class represents.

Our “economy” is no longer an actual pluralistic economy featuring competitive small businesses. It is merely a monopolistic marketplace where huge corporations exercise horizontal and vertical control over the terrain and jack-up prices while they add ever more corporate billionaires to the aristocratic class.

Our banks keep charging excruciatingly high double-digit interest rates on the middle class and triple-digit interest rates on the working poor. The western world has shunned all of this by law for over 3,000 years but today we accept as normal those interest rate levels that only crime syndicates used to exact in America.

America used to be a place where we wanted to love our neighbors. Today, we don’t even want to know their names. Technology is our only ruling principle, and whoever brings that to us is worshipped as a god, even though their lives, politics, and technology can be and are easily turned to evil designs and purposes.

Our streets periodically get swept clean of our ever-expanding class of homeless people, but only until elections are over or for special events where beauty and cleanliness is paramount. Our homeless population, like the class of “untouchables” in India, only continues to increase after those supposedly humanitarian measures outlive their temporary purposes.

The number of unstable, broken and single homes in American only increases rather than decreases as we progressively lose the ability and desire to form long-term relationships leading to adult and childhood happiness.

But don’t allow the testimony of science, or commonwealth, or spiritual sensibility, or your own eyesight to guide you. No, don’t do that. Listen instead to the false prophets of confrontation and materialism who peacock about at the heads of various sectors of our society. They will tell you the real truth.