Americans Are Entitled to Have It All

It's a hard time in America's history for people who care about such things to have much respect for the citizenship skills of our fellow Americans. Stand in a crowded mall, a WalMart, a football stadium; pick any public venue. Look left and look right at the people around you. They are bustling, they are artificially busy, they are rude, they are grabby, and they are shouting their personal business at the top of their lungs into a cell phone.

Or they are wearing a Bluetooth headset, walking alone, and appearing to hold animated conversations with unseen others in their heads. Maybe they really are. It's not hard to believe it when one contemplates the poor quality of shared citizenship being exhibited by Americans today.

If God exists, and according to a 2003 Harris poll 79% of Americans think He does, then He must be looking down on this 21st-century black hole of self-absorption that America has become and viewing us as He viewed the doomed ancient Romans sans the headsets. The collective sense of decency held by our forebearers has been sucked out of American society and thrown into a whirling vortex of consumerist Me-ism.

Though they're footing the bill, oblivious Americans are generally too faux busy to pay much attention to the global reputation being foisted upon them by the consistently speculative yet inept actions, since they seized the office in 2000, of the Bush administration.

This administration has been operating below the radar, or above (no matter to them), and slowly dissolving the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and any hope of truly spreading democracy to the rest of the world. Its help in ridding Iraq of Saddam's tyranny exemplifies the old saying, "With friends like you, who needs enemies?"

It's been a piece of Marie Antoinette's cake for the Bushies to operate both stealthily and overtly dishonestly without challenge. Why? Because too many Americans simply aren't paying enough attention to do something about it. To ask for a recall, if you will. Ask for a store rebate? Yes. But to recall incompetent, morally bankrupt, and possibly a little mentally off-center "elected" officials? Too time-consuming.

Did you have a nice 2006 holiday season? If you did, good for you. But for the second Christmas in a row, thousands of people are still floundering around New Orleans, or crammed eight to a better-late-than-never FEMA trailer, or can't return home to New Orleans at all, so they probably did not. Good thing your last two Christmases weren't like that, huh?

Did it cross your mind while you were rifling through piles of holiday gifts that you have witnessed in your lifetime one of the most blatant failures in the history of the U.S. government to care for its own citizens during a natural disaster? You'd better hope your neighborhood doesn't exist in an area statistically likely to suffer a natural calamity because gross ineptitude + photo-op concern = you're out of luck, Jack. So are you, Jill. With this administration in charge, some holiday season could find you in a strange city squatting indefinitely on someone's couch. So keep your sleeping bag packed.

Are you affected at all personally by the war in Iraq? Have a loved one there? Know someone serving? Maybe, but probaby not. And if you are old enough to remember Vietnam, did you think you would live to see it repeated? Oh, this isn't another Vietnam, you say? Sure. Now stop chasing your tail and go read something, for godsakes. There's certainly a wealth of books to choose from out there on the antics of America's oiliest Hardy boys: George Bush and Dick Cheney.

If you weren't aware, the Iraq War is being brought to you by the very same people who brought you Vietnam. They didn't like the way that ended and thought they'd take another stab at getting it right, er, wrong. Either way, it's no skin off their aristrocratic noses or the noses of anyone they sired to give it another go. If they get lucky, first prize this time is better anyway--oil., lot's of it. The Iraq War--where administration-friendly contractors get bloatedly richer and the honorable but poor just bloat in the desert.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration's modus operandi sadly seems too in tune with the rest of America's, and it has been running loose for six years, via citizen neglect or ignorance or both, and making a mockery out of everything good that America once stood for.

Our grandparents must be rolling in their graves for in their lifetimes they forged, from the hottest fires of immigration--escape from poverty and tyranny--service and sacrifice during two world wars, and from survival of a long economic Depression, a wisdom that demonstrated they understood that to whom much is given, much is required. Prior to the advent of MTV and several decades of Wall Street slogans, this was societally understood.

Life for the Greatest Generation was not one big trip to the mall. And when grandma did go shopping, she was wearing her girdle and minding her manners because these folks reverently and demonstrably appreciated the good things in life. They had learned the hard way that good times, and even life itself, could be fleeting. They didn't believe in squandering, especially not the lives of living, breathing human beings, unless it was for the most honorable of reasons.

They would be disgusted to learn that present-day America has become one big parTAAAY, and as grandpa used to say, we're standing in shit and don't recognize the smell. But grandma and grandpa would have been a lot quicker to demand a do-over with this administration if for no other reason than the fact that this president and his minions conduct themselves publicly like spoiled brats. The Greatest Generation didn't have much use for spoiled brats.

They also didn't have much patience with bad ideas either. And they sure as hell went after with a vengeance any official who had the nerve to spend their hard-earned tax money on bad ideas or bratty behavior, much less both at once. The ancestors of present America would have been standing outside the White House gates with pitchforks and torches waiting for this president to emerge whence someone would have grabbed him up and given him the lesson of his life. More's the pity that most Americans don't seem to feel that same sense of collective moral outrage today.

If you're an activist and have been busy rounding up the farm implements and soaking rags in oil, my apologies for painting you with such a wide brush. But you'll have to take it like a man or woman because there simply aren't enough of you. If there were, someone would be cell-phone-videoing the trials and punishments of our current leaders who have done no less harm, only employed different means and advertising, than those they martyr.

Citizenship, as grandpa knew it, is out of vogue. It isn't stressed much in schools. It sure isn't demonstrated by average citizens like the woman who cuts short a left turn in her car and almost takes off the front of yours while she's talking on her cell phone. The rule of law has become up for grabs, negotiable, relative, in America.

Citizenship can be demonstrated at the polls, but apparently only by a narrow margin. And that's only if one can believe the election results because a while ago a self-serving Congressman from Ohio needed campaign funds to keep a job he no longer deserved, so he joined up with distorted people to distort a law to benefit the industrialists that gave him some green. That his actions turned our electoral process on its ear was of no consequence to him or his benefactors. Time spent in a jail cell might alter his philosophy of citizenship, but he'll unlikely experience it.

America is diseased and the illness is named "Entitlement." Our citizens and our leaders have a sense of it which rivals that found in the court of Louis XVI prior to his beheading. It's fine for another American to do something selfless or honest or to whistleblow or to sacrifice his or her life to military service, but it is enough for the rest of us to just visit the mall. After all, this president told us that's how we can best help the country.

But thank heavens that's all we have to do for we modern Americans just love to accomplish things that are such a piece of cake. So, our president need not fret. It seems for the time being his position secure, and we are doing just what he needs us to do.