If this land truly is my land and your land, then we have to be good stewards. It is our home. We live here. We all need it to remain viable. Unless there is some kind of top secret awesome escape plan we will probably need clean food and water and air and stuff like that. There are a great many livelihoods to be made in stewardship of our land, our people and our resources, as well as in education, food, music, preventative health, art and culture. Those are the things that contribute the most to a truly sustainable, quality life.
Let's not turn it all into a giant oil-stained strip of chain stores and mega-malls. Let's not forget in our exuberant ME ME ME stage to pick up after ourselves, to put in some infrastructure, you know, make it a place where people can still live.
And we are always going to have neighbors and we should probably try a little harder to get along with them. Pointing guns at the neighbors is generally a bad place to start. Unless you want to have one of those, “You put the gun down, no YOU” moments it's best to try talking first. With a translator. And some research. This self-centered attitude that we are so awesome we don't even have consider, learn about or understand anyone who isn't from here is getting pretty tiresome.
If we want to maintain and truly enjoy our "freedoms" we have to pay attention to and discuss the laws that affect us. For instance, The Patriot Act (drafted a mere 44 days after 9/11) is made of pure bullshit. It sits OK with those who don't care to ponder too hard by invoking a few words that go like this: "Well if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to worry about." As if that makes it OK for the government to tap phones, search your library history and Internet browsing habits, any communications you have made as well as your private property. Probable cause? Not so necessary. And without having to tell you about it unless it brings up anything exciting. Because you are not a terrorist, right? But what if the definitions change a little? What if your information is gathered for one purpose and used for another? By the government. For the good of the people (who have not been investigated yet). To weed out the bad apples, ("bad" to be determined by the government, in a closed session, at an undisclosed location, based on secret, indisputable evidence, because government is allowed all the secrets they want but citizens may not have any and they don't want to talk about it anymore now go to bed).
Catastrophe allows our government to capitalize on fear, giving them unchecked moments in which to squeeze in changes of dubious benefit to a select few. It gives the government a temporary power boost, in which crazy amounts of paperwork and legislation are suddenly possible. I am pretty sure legislative assistants glow orange immediately following a catastrophe and are able to type, speak and get along in hyper-mode. It took 6 weeks to draft the most sweeping Freedom squelching law we've ever lived under. That's less time than a stint on The Apprentice. And it happened while we were grieving.
The election process is jacked up, so running to the polls is essentially a meaningless exercise that allows some to feel like they did their part and that's it. This country is really run by corporations, and they are neither elected nor impeachable. They are allowed to carve up our common resources and sell them back to us, and when they fail we give them even more of our money. So it's great that we marched down to the polls and picked one of the two main choices on offer, thinking we had the winning ticket to awesome town. All pumped up on Change or Values. Nice sticker though.
In the mean time there is this endless stupid debate about how far other people lean and in which direction, and all the screaming drowns out the middle, where most of the people are. There are those of us who would like to see honest, well reasoned, up-to-date discussions that are logical, compassionate, and sustainable without including bullshit labels like "Democrat" and "Republican", which are meaningless words that only serve to divide people into smug, useless, self-satisfied clubs. Either one of them could change their name to The Club That is Totally Right All The Time I Mean It and get a frothy hell yeah from the base. Seriously, aligning to a word that has no real meaning is like saying, "I only vote for people named Ed.”
I don't want to move. I still love my country, most of my favorite people are here. I am just really annoyed by our raging adolescence. I just want to be proud to live here on purpose.
