...<insert name of aromatic substance here>. Said substance may be pleasing to the nose, or downright catastrophic to sensibilities. What one should be smelling is not the issue. Rather, that one should wake up to reality is what's at stake here. This is a ranting sort of thread where you may unload heaps of vitriol (while being mindful of forum rules) upon the hypocrasy of the world we live in, and the sorry state of affairs most of us find ourselves in the midst of.
I will rant about my own country. Particularly, I am incensed that the American people have allowed themselves to be played like witless marionettes by a ruling class of wealthy elite for so very, very long. The truth of this has been ever-present in the fabric of our laws and society for the longest time: sometimes it is literally in your face; other times it lurks quietly below the surface. The Bush Administration is a poster-child of "truth glaring at you in the face". I cannot for the life of me understand why this President, his cabinet, and cronies elsewhere in the governmental apparatus have not been crucified and left to rot in the heat of a Death Valley afternoon (read = impeached and subject to criminal prosecution). That this hasn't occurred is a symptom of a terrible malaise infecting Americans, and an ominous herald of doom yet to come. At the risk of sounding mystical, I believe that's exactly what it is.
Here we have a chief executive who not only lied to the American public on numerous occasions...he also lied to world leaders and citizens of other nations. He lied about the threat posed by a relatively small country in the Middle East in order to garner the support needed to invade it, and strip it of its sovereignity. When faced with a real lack of international support, he assumed his War Face and invaded it anyway. Such is a great evil in the eyes of the now-deceased American Spirit, who went to dwell in the Great Beyond many moons ago. In it's place is the American Sickness, and its only growing more virulent as time grinds on. The ideals we as Americans once held sacred have been sold to the highest bidder, and that bidder ain't too friendly. That bidder is called Homeland Security. Those ideals were rather simple: all humans were created equal, imbued with an equal right to pursue liberty and happiness, unfettered by the chains of tyranny and despotism.
Yet it was in the name of these ideals that America began to depart from the Spirit that created it in the first place. America was meant to be a place you could go to in order to escape oppression, famine, and wars in the nation of your origin. And so it was for a time. Immigrants arrived in droves and due to their industrious efforts, America rose to prominence in the world scene.
It was that prominence that opened the path to doom for us. America was never intended to be an international crusader bearing arms against other sovereign nations in the name of its own ideals, yet that was what we eventually became. It began in earnest in the days of President Theodore Roosevelt and his doctrine of intervention in the southern Americas. To him and others in his fold, it was a moral imperative to assist the Latin Americans gain idependence from European colonial powers. They perceived the presence of European colonialism in the western hemisphere as a threat to American sovereignity. Why? Paranoia, and a fear that an opportunistic European power would attempt to invade the United States? I do believe this figured promiently in their thinking. Never mind that by the turn of the 20th century the U.S. had arguably become the most powerful nation in the world, possessed of a great wealth of natural resources and a rapidly expanding infrastructure. This was more obvious later on during the World Wars, when the U.S. achieved an industrial and manufacturing prowess unparalled in the modern world. Beleagured at first, the U.S. managed to turn the tables on a powerful Japanese Empire in the Pacific, and enabled its European allies to topple the Third Reich by virtue of a steadly influx of money, machinery and military aid. It was the crowning achievement of America for world peace in the 20th century...and alas, the last one which I feel the U.S. had pure motives regarding.
Most of us know the story from there. The canned version fed to Americans via the media and the public school system portrays America as a Crusader of Freedom standing against the tyranny and oppression of the Soviet Union, the evil empire that arose to fill the vacuum created by the fall of Japan and the Third Reich. This is the spin fed to us by the wealthy elite who infest the halls of our government buildings like so many leeches and parasitc worms, sucking the juice from our pocketbooks and ultimately, our very souls. Under the guise of Freedom they instigated wars, assassinated people, tortured dissenters, and otherwise interfered in the affairs of sovereign nations throughout the world. It was the Cold War, a war that had no good guy. In the process, America became the evil it supposedly opposed. Apart from modus operandi, how different was (and is) America from any other nation who sought to dominate the world? In my opinion, there is no difference at all.
With the fall of the USSR, Terrorism rose to take its place. Again, yet another convenient evil to fill the vacuum that appears in such absolutes and black and white. In the name of the War on Terror the American people have sold themselves into slavery, feeding the machinery of a power bent on world domination. They aren't so subtle about it this time around, either. Oh sure, they go through the motions of lying about their motives - Colin Powell anyone? - but when caught in the act, they simply shrug their shoulders and continue on with their Project for a New American Century. The American Spirit, along with visionaries like Thomas Jefferson, certainly roll over and over in their graves at the ghastly travesty of liberty occuring in their beloved country. As Thomas Jefferson once stated (I paraphrase here), a people who exchange their liberty for security are a people who do not deserve liberty at all.
End of my rant for now. Feel free to rant about whatever you want here - keeping in mind forum rules, of course.
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