It Is Nothing Personal - But It Is All Bad

By TRB

Over a year ago I took a dare from a private detective, once an army buddy. We were sitting around in some diner in Boston complaining of our youth-deprived dwindling powers. I told him I could still do the work, could still write. He didn't believe me. I was down to a column a month if I was lucky and I wasn't trying or even interested.

So I told him I would write a column a day, every day , for the next year. People don't do this. No American newspaper columnist has done it as far as I know. Most columnists will give you one a week, sometimes two, But here I was volunteering to write 365 columns over the next 365 days,

Well, I failed. But only on three days. That means I wrote a published newspaper column for 362 days out of 365. In fact, I would still bet it is a record until someone can prove otherwise.

Instant burnout you would think, but that actually helped me. I had burned out many years before and didn't have to go through the process again.

All that writing, you would think you would run out of things to write about. But no. Something is happening all of the time or is being planned in some back room in the Capitol or the Pentagon. The Intel guys are working overtime to screw up the works and are getting better every year.

Yes news is being made every hour of every day, and a good 90 percent of it is bad.

That's what gets to you today as a journalist, total immersion into the slime that once was America just to report on all the terrible things the bad people are doing to the good people. And through it all, the missing limbs in Afghistanan, the brain injuried in Iraq (we lost five guys there just yesterday) we watch as a parade of clowns offer themselves up to become our next president.

It is not even necessary to mention names anymore in this carnival of lawmakers sending photos of their no-nos out on the Twitter stream, and the gal's gal who flies into Boston and decides to change its history permanently, making up stories about Paul Revere, because she has a room temperture IQ and can't help herself. And then, when the historic evidenece is presented to prove she is wrong, she says she is not wrong, history is.

You might think it amusing to live during a period of "anything goes," but actually it's like that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you pass a bad car accident at night. You know someone has died, a soul has departed. It is an eerie feeling. It is how i feel about the United States. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the United States Supreme Court, perhaps the worst court in American history, made it possible last year for politicians to receive as much money as they want and call that money "free speech."

In the process, the United States Supreme Court ruined the United States. They all swore to protect the Constitution. But the conservative wing of the court hurt this country worse than bin Laden ever did, when it vomited up that ruling. It literally took our representative democracy away. Maybe some day, we will see those Supreme Court Justices behind bars, because that is where they belong. They are criminals. The real thing.

Allowing the politicians to just take money whenever they wanted it, gave them the advantage of ignoring the voter, They are buying their seats year after year and we are voting them into office. So, we share some of the blame. I am not saying we should replace them with the deranged minds of the Tea Party. I believe we need a progressive government, one that works for progress for the people, not for the politician and not for the government..

You have to ask youself, who are these millions of people who have lost their homes and where are they now? What is the real unemployment rate? What happens if we raise the debt ceiling so high the value of the dollar drops on the world market? Should the spectacular difference between the few very wealthy and the millions of American poor be allowed to continue unabated?

These are all questions that are going to get us in the end. Nothing good comes from where we are going. When a government takes better care of its corporations who are operating overseas than its own people who are living in its streets, then we are on the verge of a change larger than Obama ever imagined, and probably not a change he would like. We seem to have a government that is almost fixed on creating the proper environment for a revolution.

Just look at the inflated gas prices, Why do we have those? Is it a supply/demand situation that you might expect in a capitalistic economy? Far from it. It is greedy folks on Wall St. whom our government allows to gamble and make bets on the price of gasoline. So it is an artificial manipulation of the market, one that Obama could stop with a simple phone call to Wall Street, or an executive order making betting on gas prices a crime.

You see the impact of this Wall Street gambling everytime you go into a supermarket. The prices are all higher becauses gas prices are higher. Did you ever think for a moment that a United States government would sit back and watch as its own people were robbed by the health care industry, robbed by the banking industry, robbed by the Defense and Intelligence departments, robbed by Wall Street and robbed by other nations, mostly China, who is openly stealing our patents and our copyrights and isn't even getting a slap on the wrist for it?

This horrible version of the U,S. government that seems ready to throw us all to the wolves, has a lot of explaining to do to its people. If it doesn't start soon, it might be too late to save us and itself.