Orlando

Group prayers. I cannot imagine anything less useful than groups of folks talking to an imaginary being about the horrific event in Orlando. After which, of course, the same folks go out and have a beer and talk about the latest episode of Veep . . . or whatever TV program gets their rocks off.

We listened to Steven Colbert interview Bill O’Reilly, mostly about Orlando—yeah, that Bill O’Reilly. And I found myself holding the TV remote (we TIVO the show), having to almost forcibly restrain myself from fast forwarding just to get rid of the lying little creep O’Reilly. But I kept reminding myself of Sun Tzu—Know Thine Enemy.

Between the shooting itself, the brainless ramblings of Donald Trump, and the astonishing calls for killing people coming from Republicans, and, especially, from pastors of the right (Christian Taliban folks), I find myself sinking into a morass of despair.   How could this country have sunk to this level of idiocy?

And then I remind myself. This is Amurrica Richard. We are at or near the ending of the great American experiment with democracy. It’s been 200 years, or thereabouts, and that is apparently the life cycle of democracies.  Between the Christian Taliban, and the criminal bankers, both seeking power in their own ways, our country has been hijacked.  We need to take it back, but we (I) seem not to know how to accomplish that. I would say that maybe some horrible event would galvanize the public, and they would then get off their collective asses and throw the bankers in prison, kick the Christian Taliban in the ass and move them back into their closets, and then take away much of the arsenal that the crazy fucking gunners (small penis crowd) seem to believe they need. No, we don’t need to take away all their guns, just most of them, and certainly all of the things that resemble machine guns.  Maybe let folks have single-shot shotguns, and single shot pistols.

See, mainly, I’m not afraid of the State taking away my freedom, so much as I fear the crazed gunners of our country taking away the lives of people I hold dear.  And we all really know that the Second Amendment was not about assuring that every crazy person in Amurrica could own a machine gun.  It was all about a “well-regulated militia”.  In some circles, that’s now called the National Guard.

But our rapid decline into third world country status isn’t just about guns (although they do go together). It’s about the failure to educate our population—our public education system used to be a shining star and it is now rapidly deteriorating into a global joke, leaving us with a seriously dumbed-down population. It’s about our health care system that leaves thousands/millions out of our care system, including our veterans who frankly deserve better.  It’s about our growing problem of student debt, which will lead eventually to the demise of our great system of higher education. It’s about our inability to create an employment base for most of our workforce—we seem not to understand that if we continue to ship all jobs overseas, we will eventually fail as a nation. And that latter isn’t a problem created by our President, or even by our singularly inept Congress. It continues to be created and maintained by our bankers and our business CEO’s who make more money that way and who care not a fig about the effects on the nation’s workforce.  They don’t care folks. They don’t care.

And that is the central problem.  Too many of our people simply don’t care. They are too busy praying to non-existent figures in the sky, or playing video games to care.

Maybe we really have lost the ability to think, and, therefore, to care. Maybe it really is all over. I keep hoping not. I keep hoping that our grandchildren will turn out smarter and more caring than we are, and that they will take back their country from the inept grasp of their forebears.

Maybe.

Maybe

Maybe, he said hopefully, but sadly.