Depressing political post

[bobquasit]

Someone over on Askville said that a vote for a third-party candidate was a vote for McCain, and that another Republican Presidency would make this country "sink beneath the seas". The answer that poured out of me surprised and depressed even me:

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We're a nation that tortures. We're in so much debt, nationally and individually, that we'll never pay it off. We're hooked on cheap & toxic goods from China, and the prices are starting to go up. Our houses are now worth less than the amount we owe on them, collectively. Our infrastructure is crumbling. We've lost the right to privacy, not only to the government, but to any company that wants to peek into your private life. Business lobbyists openly write legislation and regulations that cover their industry. Dead spots in the ocean are increasing at a dramatic rate. Russia has proved that we're powerless to stop yet another ruthless dictatorship with ambitions for world hegemony - as if China weren't enough to deal with. Our world-wide credibility has never been lower. Our "leaders" spend most of their time on vacation, or at meaningless events whose sole purpose is to avoid dealing with any of our actual problems. Sometime in the past few decades our so-called "free press" decided that it was much more comfortable to mindlessly repeat government talking points and tabloid stories than actually, you know, investigate. Our soldiers are coming back maimed in record numbers, and our government ignores them or denies them care. The suicide rate is climbing, particularly among veterans. The foreclosure rate is soaring to historic highs. Inflation is at a 17-year high. And there's every sign that most of this is going to get worse, not better, in the decades to come - no matter what we do.

The nation is in crisis as it has never been before. We need an FDR. But that's not enough. We need the citizens of this country to wake up and start taking action to get us off this one-way road to utter collapse.

What have we got? An old man who'll say or do anything for one last chance to validate himself, and a younger man who's shown that he too will throw any inconvenient principle overboard if it gets in his way - including the Constitution that he swore to uphold.

Sink beneath the seas? It's time to buy some scuba gear, because we're already there and we won't be coming up for air any time soon.

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http://askville.amazon.com/nation-tortures-debt-nationally-individually-pay/DiscussionPost.do?requestId=14434230&commentId=14436224&commentNumber=7&pageNumber=1

I'd have thrown this behind the politics filter, but I haven't done a political post in a few days (I think) - so what the hell.

Comments

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

Well....

I've had a dark view of, pretty much everything lately. But as I see it in Obama we get a President who is no worse than Bill Clinton and no worse than many Presidents we've had (let's remember that FDR was no saint) while in McCain we get a President who is inclined to aggressiveness in foreign policy and who will stack the Supreme Court with as conservative of Justices as he can, making it so that we don't get occasionally saved by Justice Kennedy's whim.

Of course there are the host of other problems that the nation faces which are rather difficult. The shortage of energy, the lack of enough investment in the real basic research that leads to real progress, stuff like that. For all that, I think we're not quite dead yet and shouldn't go in the cart. We can survive, but if we have a President McCain it'll be a whole lot harder.

We've never actually lived in the America that lives up to all its supposed ideals in any event. People have been spied on for their supposed political dangers pretty much at least since WW2. In WW1, once we were in it, people were jailed for opposing it (that's where the 'crying fire in a crowded theater" thing comes from; a judge used that in convicting a socialist who was against our involvement in that war). The country overall was blindingly racist with more or less official sanction from the 1890s through to the 1960s. And I'm not sure that our "democracy" has ever really been the democracy we pretend we have; the system is very nearly designed to be actually run by elites/oligarchies. So while I object to the policies of aspiring King George and the failure of the Democrats to do much about it, I'm not under the illusion that we're really falling from some kind of State of Grace.

So while I could give in to a greater state of despair than my normal varying state of depression, I'm not so much.