Despair Begs for a Mountain, and the Ease to Sit Upon It

I have an inbred tendency to be a recluse, one I often must fight against. While both my heritage and background gives me a natural tendency to seek solitude, it also forces me to interact and experience everything I can to keep myself honest in my opinions of the world I inhabit. One cannot opine in or rejoice in or condemn a world or segment of that world and its culture unless one is a part of that world. I also happen to believe that the first responsibility of citizenship is awareness.

Nevertheless, I find myself daily more horrified by this world of ours, particularly our nation. The most recent events and actions of this country under our current leadership makes me long for a mountain top where I can sit in solitude, withdrawn and apart from what we have become and what we seem to lack to fortitude to change. This is not the country of my birth. With few exceptions, these are not the caliber of people our shared history praises or our proud traditions celebrate. My disgruntlement first morphed into embarrassment, but it has now changed to despair and shame at the same time I feel the internal surging and crashing of the hot lava that is intense anger.

The dichotomy in our nation today is shocking, and it is not because the country is polarized as everyone seems to gleefully report. It is that our leadership grows every more fascist while our populace grows ever more complacent in their ignorance, selling our national soul for empty assurances, lies and promises of safety. They do not see that the tactic being used to gain their compliance is that which our leaders say they are protecting them against. Terror. As such, our government's war on terror is actually a subtle war against the welfare of the people in this country using fear as a cudgel to subdue them into acceptance of that which is unacceptable - the loss of individual privacy, the loss of human rights, the loss of their pride in themselves as thinking, productive, aware people within a democracy. Today, the consent of the governed is little more than the sniveling acquisesence of slaves to a dictatorship. It's disgusting and it's heartbreaking, and if these sheep ever look up, they will find that the judas goat has led them into the chute and the mallet is descending toward their heads. The monied elite will have mutton for supper.

That the Constitution of these United States is being subverted and ignored is not only dangerous and tragic, but has been happening for five years with very few of our staunch citizenry raising an outcry. Did we learn nothing from Watergate? Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Did we learn nothing about lies told at the pinnacle of power and how the first lies beget only more lies to cover the first...the second...the third? Our government is neck deep in corruption, in bought votes, in the torture of others, in the ignoring of the due process of law, in the grabbing for additional power so it can be placed in the hands of a single man or group which is supposed to be one of three arms of a balanced approach to governing rather than a single dictatorial body. Can people not understand that if the guarantees of our constitution are denied in a so-called time of war - a war instigated through lies by one element within our government - those guarantees are easily denied at any time? Do they not question the idea that this country will be at perpetual war even when those in power have told them so? Do they not realize that there is only a very thin line that separates the torture of prisoners denied due process and the torture of anyone? And that there is an even thinner line between that and genocide?

Wake up, America!! Your ignorance does not become you. Your illusions of safety will not save you. If you allow only one man or one group in this government to usurp all power and authority, there will eventually be no bread and the only circus will be the one in which the trained elephants stomp and demolish all the spectators. Wrapping yourself in a tattered flag will not save the country you knew, nor will wearing a small plastic flag made in China gain you entry into the entourage of the new fascist dictator.

You have much to fear, America....but it is from inside our borders.