America, the Third World
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Look well, America, and tremble at the vision of your destruction.
Witness now, the removal of all our societal advances; the rollback of the heritage earned for us by decades of blood, of protest, and of democratic process.
Behold the death of a classic American city, left to lie in the sun and slowly decompose by social Darwinists of the modern era, and assaulted by the corporate feudal lords whose bidding is attended to by Governor Rick Snyder, left to suffer without even the decency of hospice. With more vacant and abandoned industrial land than totals the land area of Washington, DC, Detroit's carcass will become a sad reminder of the days when we were once a nation that built and manufactured, not got other people to do it for us.
In pure devotion to the Libertarian Warrior Ethos, the Right passed a farm subsidies bill on July 11 so egregiously immoral and obscene, it felt surreal: grossly large subsidies to big industrial farms and corporations, yet absolutely nothing--not a single cent--to our nation's critical SNAP program, which keeps some food on the tables for families around the country. When asked about whether or not they planned to address this issue, House Speaker John Boehner snapped, "We'll get to it later."
America does not merely feel broken anymore. No, this nation is horribly and nigh irreparably broken, ground to powder by those who have succeeded in ensuring no human being after they have even the remote chance of enjoying an even semi-decent life on these shores. In various and more frequently appearing areas of this country, in both rural areas and even former big cities, the land jingoistically professed to be the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave resembles some of the most impoverished places on the planet.
And while all of this rages on, the House of Representatives has become a festering wound of seditious anarchy, grinding to a screeching halt the very engine of our government via obstruction and copper-headed nihilism. In their mad dash to wash clean from history's record of the abomination of desolation they see Barack Obama to be, Republicans in both houses of the legislative branch of our government have gone completely insane, willing to set the entire world ablaze to "save America" from the Kenyan socialist Muslim onslaught. Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday,
The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all.
And the results of these are frightening. The New York Times reported yesterday that there are swaths of places throughout this country where economic mobility is nigh impossible, with places like Atlanta almost ensuring the stratification of your class via income. For an increasing number of Americans, poverty is a caste system; a social state that dooms the adult and the children that come after. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported on the efforts of some in Greene County, Tennessee to get free lunches to children in some of the poorest areas of the state...
[Rick] Bible had lived in Greene County his entire life, but the trailer parks on his route reminded him of Belize, where he had traveled on a mission trip a decade earlier. He had spent a week there building a basic shelter for a homeless man while 70 other homeless people watched, wondering if Bible might build them houses, too. What he had experienced then was the same combination of fatigue and helplessness he felt now, looking inside the Laughrens’ dilapidated trailer. In this part of the country, in this time, no amount of sack lunches would ever be enough.
When one takes stock of all that is happening here in this country, and realizes just how close we truly are to being a nation that eschews equality of opportunity for the success of a chosen, privileged few, it begs to wonder, will we ever have a truly honest debate about how poverty is viewed in this country? Will we soldier on, like good consumerists, and humbly bow before our perversion of meritocracy in the form of great rags-to-riches stories on ESPN? Will we fall under the weight of our own fatigue, too tired and sick with no money in our pockets to do what is necessary?
The answer cannot wait. Our future, for good or ill, depends on it.
