Have you ever had one of those moments where you feel like telling the wingnuts on the right, "I hope Bush gets reSelected so this country gets what it deserves"?
I'm having one of those today.
There are times when I feel like someone must have spiked the national water supply with a dose of really bad acid. You come home at night, turn on the news, and another 20 Iraqis have died from a car bomb attack. In the first half of September alone, 51 Americans died for the lie in the desert. 200+ people get blown up in a school and two airplanes get blown out of the sky in Putinstan. A quiet genocide of an entire race of people is taking place in Sudan while the world stands by and watches. We see pictures of naked men stacked in a pyramid in a dark foreign jail corridor, or forced to masturbate with a West Virginny girl smiling and pointing with a Marlboro hanging out of her mouth, or hooded and caped with electrodes connected to testicles and nipples.
And we grimace and change the channel.
The average American worker is much worse off economically than they were four years ago, and 45,000,000 Americans fly without the net of healthcare coverage. The U.S. government gets in bed with drug manufacturers, sticks the taxpayer with a tab of $500,000,000,000 ($100 Billion of that hidden from lawmakers by a bureaucratic aparatchik). Not one person goes to jail.
3000 lives are lost on American soil in a single day to terrorist ambitions, the President of the United States spends SEVEN FULL MINUTES during the attack flipping through a kids book, and the cover-up is more robust than the fact finding. Not ONE SINGLE PERSON in the government, a government that is chartered first and foremost with protecting its citizens, is fired. And not ONE SINGLE PERSON sits in a jail cell, anywhere in the world, convicted or awaiting trial for the crime.
A war hero is crucified on the cross of public opinion, and a military deserter is hailed as the Caesar who will lead the nation to righteous victory against the godless brown pagans.
Yet here we sit as a nation, blindly accepting the bizarre circumstances that the past four years have brought, simply because fully half of the electorate in the country can't get past the indiscretion of Bill Clinton's dick.
Many years ago, I was told that an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before they realize that they're as low as they can go. Some addicts survive bottoming out, some don't. For those that make it, the bounce off the bottom might hurt like hell, but in many cases it's the only way someone in those circumstances can start going up again.
We're at that co-dependent point as a nation.
A thousand years from now, I believe our heirs will look back at the past dawn of a new millennium, and see the next 50 or 100 years as a turning point in the history of the human race. They'll chuckle when they read that the ruling elite of the most powerful nation on the planet was beholden to a religious sect that plied its trade (and made their personal fortunes) in advancing the belief that the prophecies of the Book of Revelations would be fulfilled in their lifetimes.
In the big scheme of things, and maybe even in the short run, it probably doesn't make a damn bit of difference who's running the imperial show -- at least as long as we continue to maintain the status quo. One thousand years from now, will it make a difference who America chose as its leader in 2004? While I'd like to think so, probably not, for more reasons than I care to go into in a short blog posting.
Still, I'm selfishly a supporter of John Kerry, partly because I'm a 50 year old Democrat, but mostly because I think Kerry is the best immediate chance I have of seeing 55 without experiencing some serious mushroom clouding at various locations on the planet. Yet there are nights such as tonight when I think that there has to be a globally defining event that drives the human race to reconsider the stewardship of itself, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference who's in charge when the shit hits the fan.
In retrospect, perhaps of all the Democratic Party presidential wannabes, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich best understood my fears. As I sit quietly in the small personal space of my office (and my thoughts) tonight, I'm thinking about the next quantum leap that the human race must take to survive to the next millennium.
I don't know that John Kerry is the springboard to such a leap.
But I know in my heart and my guts and my soul that George Bush is not.
