yeasterdays don't count anymore

[Barb]

"...they just lie on the floor till we sweep them away."

The Regressive Antidote - Our Impoverished Politics

The distance traveled from Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King (or even John Kennedy) to Barack Obama represents a stunning collapse of empire. Once a powerful country that could, with partial justification, boast of leadership in the moral sphere, we have today shrunken, literally and figuratively, to a nation of Newts looking for some kind of cheap Rush.

For better and, unfortunately, sometimes for worse, this is a country that used to have big aspirations. Now we’re like a two-bit drunken banana republic, thrashing about in the gutter of history as we implode from the toxic combination of greed, stupidity, indolence and hubris.

We once used to conduct a war on poverty. Now we just incarcerate the impoverished. In privately-owned, for-profit, jails, no less.

We once used to take care of our aged and elderly. Now our big social programs legislation does little more than redirect huge masses of taxpayer funds to corporations.

We once cared about promoting equality. Now when Oliver Stone makes the movie Wall Street in order to offer a cautionary tale about the perils of greed, a hundred thousand new stock trader careers are launched instead, in proud emulation of Gordon Gekko.

We used to be serious about protecting the air we breath, the water we drink and the land we live on from the ravages of pollution. Now we standby and watch with our hands in our pockets as we toast an entire planet to a lethal crisp.

We once used to explore the boundaries of what civil liberties could be sustained in sprawling industrialized democracy. Now we race to legislate them away as fast as we can, while the state ignores “guaranteed” protections of privacy or due process whenever it wants to, anyhow.

We once used to race to the moon, pushing ourselves to do the impossible. Now we just stick dynastic disasters of DNA dice like George W. Bush before a podium to haplessly call for a yawn-inducing, focus-group scripted, mission to Mars.

We once used to care about how we were perceived internationally, even as we nevertheless too often displayed the belligerence of our power. Now we don’t even bother with the former, while we’ve raised the latter to a high art.

We once used to come together as a whole country to address threats and shared national concerns, all of us making enormous sacrifices toward a common purpose. Today, our presidents encourage us to go shopping.

Is it any wonder that our political rhetoric is so uninspired today? It’s the perfect representation of our impoverished moral spirit.

And it’s likely to bite us hard in the not-too-distant future, if it isn’t doing so already.

It’s been nearly half a century since JFK so aptly reminded us, “Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”