USA: The Lonely Community






Now that our leader has made another in a series of great speeches for people who can’t hear, our problems with illegal immigration will soon be over. And we have a new general in charge of the blood bath in Afghanistan, so things will move more swiftly toward victory for truth, justice and the American way. If that’s what you think, put however many teeth you have left under your pillow and expect the tooth fairy to leave you hundreds of shares of stock in British Petroleum. Those who accuse our president of being weak or gutless can now see that he is actually a bold, take charge kind of guy, just what we need at this critical time in our history. And if you believe that you may as well place your entire body under that pillow.



But seriously, what does all this mean and where are we headed?

Are those liberals suffering endless fear-of-their-own-shadow syndrome correct to think there is an armed uprising threatened by right wing militias and a chance for a military coup?
Or are those conservatives afflicted with eternal intellectual constipation correct to think the nation is being led to a communist-socialist-Muslim dictatorship that will soon have us all in work camps, penal colonies or alien prayer groups?

Is the disastrous oil gusher in the gulf a sign of the end of life as we know it or simply a good reason to drill further away from shore?

Does finance capital’s increasing control of the political economy mean Obama is the reincarnation of Stalin?

Are we in the process of seeking personal success and self- esteem as hyphenated individuals while suffering the total loss of our social capacity to reason?

The facts are that we’re in very deep trouble and if we don't start moving more quickly toward transformation of our political economic system things that seem frightening now may soon become nightmares from which we are unable to awaken. 

There are signs of hope, and not only from foreign places where they usually emanate, but from right here in the USA.

The meeting of the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, the second such gathering in the USA, brought together hundreds from across the globe with thousands here under the banner "Another World is Possible, Another U.S. is Necessary", in meetings devoted to working for just such a transformation. While our mind managers fill our heads with recycled news waste about the G20 meetings in Toronto, budgets that will never be balanced and foreign wars that may never end, the necessity for humanity to wrest power from the hands of minorities devoted to profit and domination was never more essential. The attendees of the United States Social Forum (USSF) plan to do just this – beginning on a more local level.
That is an especially tall order given our fractured population, divided and nearly conquered by being manipulated into alienated identity groups taught to worship anything but common interest and class solidarity.

As a nation of competing individuals in a free market culture where there is no such thing as a free lunch we are supposed to be hyphenated Americans, Balkanized even while extolling what are called patriotic American values. Those values would seem to be of war and separatism concerning sex, religion, race, caste, hobbies and more, but without a thought given to class interest, which isn't supposed to exist at all in our one nation of one people dreamland. Is it any wonder we sometimes sound like seriously disturbed people? We are disturbed and we have a right to be, but not about what they tell us is disturbing.

People are led to worry about public debt with little concern about what the debt pays for. Government spending is under attack without notice that most of that spending is for war and finance capital bailouts, while budgets for social service are being slashed. Otherwise intelligent people are led to believe the most fantastic and irrational nonsense under the stress and strain of a political media consciousness control apparatus that warns of a non existent Iranian threat while it lavishes praise on an Israeli state scorned and despised by most of the world for its irrational and murderous behavior. We are told that increasing the blood bath in Afghanistan will create democracy and friendship for our nation among the people we are killing, and some of us actually believe that is the case. As we allegedly fight against terrorism in other parts of the world, we are extending the threat to within our own country, with terrorists being born and bred right here in the USA.

 
The cliché is that it’s always darkest just before the dawn, and it is getting much darker out there. We need to turn on the lights. We need a movement to benefit all of us and not just some of us and it is in process of forming .The sooner we can look past self-ish propaganda manipulation and see that personal survival is dependent on social change, the sooner we’ll become a human community with some chance of success.