I'm livid
I'm afraid
I'm frustrated
I'm pissed
I'm amazed
I'm saddened
I'm baffled
I'm stumped
And this is all at my fellow Americans.
Dive below the scummy pond surface for an example of what I mean:
My mother (don't get me wrong, I do love her!) is typical of what is happening in America.
My mother married my Dad at a young age because she got pregnant with me. She had me just days after her 17th birthday and stuck with my asshole of a father for 20+ years, even though he verbally and physically abused his family. (His favorite bumper sticker was the 60s era "America - Love it or leave it" but he was a bullshit artist who hardly worked an honest day in his life. He's still alive and well off in Hawaii after somehow hijacking his uncle's fortune from it's rightful heirs.) I know she loved me, but I'm not sure how much she cared. The only positive thing I can truly say I got from my mother was a sense that civil rights were a good thing, as long it was Roots and Cicely Tyson and on TV. She never bothered to get involved in anything.
After finally dispensing with my Dad, she became a partier and had several lovers and at least one other marriage until she married Bill. (Fortunately, I missed most of this because the Air Force sent me to Europe for a large number of years. I was glad to be away!).
Bill was a supposedly self-made man who got his fortune by working his way up the coporate ladder at Shoney's Big Boy. What a surprise, they met in a bar and he was almost 20years older than her. By the time he married my mother, most of the money was gone, but he had a pension/investments and she had a fairly decent job. Bill was also a colossal liar!!! He claimed he was a Corsair pilot in the Marines in WWII. He even had fake documents made up to support the lie. Years later, one of Bill's son discovered the truth from his mother. He wasn't a Corsair pilot, but a mechanic. (Nothing dishonorable about that at all! I was an aircraft mechanic for 20years in the air force!)
He died several years later (1998?) leaving her in a position where she didn't have to work if she didn't want to. She promptly partied her way through the money and the last of her looks (my mother was a beautiful woman). As a remedy, she spent $3000 and had the skin burnt off her face with lasers to try and regain some looks.
Eventually she hooked this idiot John who has worked for Raytheon for 20+ years pulling down really, really great money. Did I mention, he's also an alcoholic who goes through a case of beer a night? Fortunately, he's afraid of my mother and is not the abusive type. He fancies himself to be some type of an expert in obsolete currencies, newspapers, and old SF movies. He invested several thousand dollars into some scheme of his brothers, and promptly lost it all. He lost money everywhere! She was on a spending spree of clothes and fancy dishes and 2 brand new cars. Before you knew it, they had their cards maxed out and a second mortgage on a house that was previously almost paid for.
Digression: Somewhere along the way she started to listen to Rush Wormtongue. While Clinton was president, whenever politics was mentioned, all she could talk about was his blowjob and how liberals were destroying America. Add her nightly ration of boxed wine and the vitriol got worse. In those days, I tried to ignore it, and never brought up the things I believed, just to preserve family unity.
Undigress: So to solve their financial problems they settled on declaring bankruptcy. Okaaay, but with a twist. To protect John's retirement and for other reasons I don't understand, they got a sham divorce. My fine conservative, values laden mother, got a sham divorce because her and her idiot husband couldn't manage their money. So they stiffed all their creditors, and basically walked out on all their commitments. Fortunately for them, this happened before the MBNA bankruptcy bill.
After declaring bankruptcy, the very first thing they did was put $5000 into their kitchen with all new cabinets. No lie. $5000 on kitchen cabinets. No savings. No preparing for a rainy day. Kitchen fucking cabinets.
Meanwhile, whenever politics was mentioned at all around her it was as if Rush Wormtongue had entered the room. I avoided the discussion. But a final straw was reached. The academy award nominations were announced and she was happy that Passion of the Christ and Farenheit 911 were not nominated. I asked her if she had seen Farenheit 911, and she replied no, it was full of lies. I replied, "How do you know if you haven't seen it, or is it just because Rush Limbaugh said so?". Her idiot husband chuckled and she flipped me off(my mother really did flip me off!) with the remark "Since when did you become a liberal?". "Ma," I replied, "You never asked. When you're drunk you don't listen anyway." And I left. She never apologized and wouldn't see me to the door.
A bit later, Katrina happened. I brought up the subject of how the Corp of Engineers had been starved of funds for maintenance, and she said, and I quote, "That's bullshit. You believe the lies you want to believe and I'll believe the lies I want to believe."
I'm now at this point, I love my mother, but hate to see what she has become. She spouts conservative talking points about how liberals are destroying American values, while she doesn't demonstrate any meaningful positive values. She is typical of a large percentage of the Wormtongue dittoheads out there, wehre the contradictions between what they say and the way they live their lives is so glaring it has blinded me to the good that is in them.
This is why I despair. These people are gone. Rush Wormtongue and his cohorts have done their work exceedingly well. Even now, the latest approval rating for Bush in AZ is 48%.48 freaking %. Unless something drastic happens America is fucking doomed.
Finally, I tried to read Gibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" years ago, but couldn't manage it, so I read Asimov's pseudo version, the "Foundation Trilogy". One of the later books in the series (not part of the trilogy, but can't remember the title) described Hari Seldon's experiences in a decaying civilization that was only carrying on out of sheer, gargantuan inertia, where elevators quit working in the Imperial capital because trained, competent technicians were rare. Where social decay led to decadence of the ruling class and larger and larger chunks of the populace sunk further and further into poverty and ignorance. That is the America I sense around me.
Things are falling apart around the edges, where the rich are getting richer, and the poor are sliding away into blissful ignorance.
Sorry about this rant, but yes I am angry
I'm livid
I'm afraid
I'm frustrated
I'm pissed
I'm amazed
I'm saddened
I'm baffled
I'm stumped