Is it just me?

After about 8 years of bush....

Terrorist attacks here in the US, two of our tallest buildings attacked and fell to the ground, gas prices higher now than on 9/11 (and I remember stations hiking the prices back then), a war on two fronts, national debt growing, less rights now than ever before, food prices going up faster than ever before, home foreclosures at all time highs, bankruptcy laws reformed to the benefit of banks/creditors, everyone treated like a terrorist or a threat when they board a plane, national parks suffering more now than ever, poverty on the rise,.... hell I could go on all night.

America is nothing like I remember it. We the people are now the potential enemy. We are all a threat. And it is not just from the right I see this. If I smoke, I am costing you more. If I ride a cost saving motorcycle to work I could cost society more as I am more prone to worse accidents. If I drive a much safer SUV to work I am hurting you as well because I am using more gas and harming the environment.

If I eat crappier foods because it is all I can afford than I am harming you as well because my health will be worse and drive up your health care costs. If I don't have the right light bulbs in my house, than I am harming you and the environment, if I have more than one kid I am contributing to the demise of us all.

I am so fucked any way I go I am not sure how to live anymore without guilt and fear/terror. If I am not a threat to the right I am to the left.

My very existence to some harms the earth, to others I am a potential threat to the security of the nation if I am not willing to be fingerprinted, photographed, and monitored all the time.

I keep hearing from all sides *I* am a threat - yet those in power who are funding wars and polluting our world en masse are getting a pass day in and out from those I voted into power to represent me.

THEY take MY money to pay for an unjust war that kills so many, their policies are the ones that keep fucking up our environment, they are the ones driving day in and out many miles to capitol hill in gas guzzling vehicles.

Someday, if I am lucky, the people will wake up and see that we are not the problem - the ones we gave power to are.

Is it just me, or are we so busy kicking each others' asses that we don't see what people in power are doing to us?

If you want to lead, do so by example. Don't tell me to change, cut back, etc, until you have done so.

Smoking in bars, gay marriage, abortion, guns, etc and so on are just a few things we all seem to fight over or get behind - all the while the real crimes come and go.

Is it just me or have we already lost the war against bush and a dictatorship?

We did lose, because we have seen each other as the enemy while the real enemy has gotten away with murder.

We lost when we started to see each other as the enemy and not them.

We lost when we let people keep gays out of the military, from being married, when we sided with letting the government dictate to private business owners tell people what they could do in bars, when we made our entire lives about money and how we could spend less by controlling the lives of others when it came to health care....

When we decided that our own lives and money was more important than the freedom of us all.

We lost long ago. The day we put our safety and money ahead of our freedoms. It is that day that we gave up our freedoms.

We deserve the government we get. We supported fascism and the removal of our own freedoms in the name of money.

They supported it in the name of stopping terrorism.

In the end, we all voted for having our government more involved in our lives out of fear of x/y/z. In the end, we decided that what others do we want to control, not on a macro level, but on a micro one.

We lost when we abandoned the principles of freedom for the illusion of safety and saving money.

This system we are in is designed to keep us focusing on everything except the people we should be focusing on.

It's like the Truman Show, but on a global scale.

:-)

Ok, on topic...

Much of this began a very long time ago.

People are inherently lazy, and go where they're pointed.

What they've done is brilliant, because no politician can undo it. If you try to rein in governmental control/spying and something happens, it's because we reduced spending. If you don't rein it in and something happens, you just weren't spending enough.

No matter which decisions are made, the opponents in the next election will blame everything bad on you and everything good on your predecessor.

I think the test is the election. If we let McCain have the White House, they'll declare another mandate and things will get worse. If a Democrat takes office, in the beginning I think they'll be more hawkish than the Republicans just to prove to some nebulous group that they're tough. But with time, a Democrat can start hosing off the filth left by Bush and his people.

I don't think we're too far gone. If things get bad enough to the point that normal people get pissed off, we might see something happen. $4.00 gasoline might be that trigger. Watching food, medicine, fuel all go up while cutting into savings and investment for retirement will drive some new folks into the streets that wouldn't have been there last year.

No it's not just you. Chimpface has ruined our society. And what he hasn't ruined he's fucked up. Fear is his calling card and he is as evil as his daddy Dick Cheney. He has us by the balls in his egotistical delusions and we're to frightened by his hate mongering to try and escape. Barack Obama offers us hope for the future, where we'll all get treated more fairly and where the hatred and fear of the last eight years will come to an end.

:rofl:

Although it is maddening and heartbreaking that so many of us who fought so hard against this have to suffer too, the barren fruits of this administration were bound to occur and are probably what it takes to wake up Americans. Have they had enough yet? I sure hope so.

Every statement you made has been the observation and mantra coming from the underclass, under served, or the poor, in this country for years.

These groups served as the demonstration groups where individual and civil liberties were eroded and was constantly under attack as the larger society remained silent.

It is only now, that the 'same' plight of the 'working poor' and similar groups is felt throughout society and is engulfing larger groups.

While most Americans have fully accepted and adapted to individualism and greed as a means of survival, the real moral to this story is 'when one of us is chained, none of us is free'.

I think that if you refuse to change to, you know, not kill the only freaking planet we have to live on until someone else does, you're pretty childish. What did the polar bears do to you? What did my cats do to you? What did all living beings on the planet do to you for you to sit around and pout and say "I can pollute and put out as much carbon dioxide as I want because that other dude is driving a Hummer, so hah!" Check back in a few decades and tell me if it was worth the destruction and death to sit around and wait for other people to change first.

And with smoking - my father smoked a lot. He died when I was in first grade - it was a heart attack, but the autopsy showed he was developing emphysema and I'm sure that didn't help. Also, before he died we all had upper respiratory diseases pretty frequently. When he died those stopped.

So now I choose to not smoke and don't want to be around smoke when I go to public places. It's not about money. It's not about controlling others. It's about not dying. I don't want to die. I like being alive. Therefore, I choose to not smoke and to not be around smoke.

But I do think that adults can choose whether or not to go somewhere that allows smoking and outlawing it in all public places is a bit overkill - like I think it could be allowed in bars at the discretion of the owner.

This whole fascism thing has happened before and will happen again - it's a human thing, not an American thing. Humans in general are sucktards who live in fear and hate and like to hurt and repress and kill others. And it's not like we were some shining pure happy perfect place before Bush the Second - we had slavery, we committed genocide against the Native Americans, we put Japanese people in camps in WWII, we lynched people. I really don't even know that we've ever been a democracy to begin with - the system has always been rigged for the people with money. It's just that now they're not putting so much effort into the window dressing and you're beginning to see the man behind the curtain.

I mean, I agree with your overall point really. I'm just quibbling with the details - for instance, I think that pitting poor whites against immigrants is a much better example of people seeing each other as enemies than smoking laws and childish pouting over being expected to not destroy the planet.

And yes, that happened before Bush too - Frederick Douglass talks about how the slaves were pitted against the poor whites back in the early to mid 1800s and how it was done precisely to keep them from realizing what they had in common and rising against the slave owners.

And humans haven't learned a damned thing since. And we will never learn. I imagine that when our evil finally catches up to us, we'll go down evil - we'll react to disaster with more hatred and violence and killing and destruction.

Humans are proof that there is no intelligent design.

I have added a new word to my vocabulary :)

voting against their interests, instead voting "values issues" but none of us is really any better. We seldom look at our candidates (including state and local) to see where they stand on the REAL issues and the media isn't getting us there. Instead, we allow them to lead us down the Tuzla, flag pin, pastorbation wormhole. As a result, we get more of the same without batting an eye. More politicians whoring us out for more corporate insider information and more greed.