I attended a church lecture given by a relief worker who returned from the Mideast. She spent three months there helping some UN volunteer organizations coordinate relief to the Iraqi refugee camps forming in Southern Lebanon and Syria.
This is my paraphrase of her description of the scene.
There are shanty town tent cities popping up in Syria and Lebanon. And from Iraq, there is a long line of desperate shell shocked people who were forced to walk away from everything they had. Their clothes. Their precious belongings. Their jobs. Their friends. Many are on foot. Some are piled dangerously into dangerous vehicles. They are desperate and scared and few hear their stories.
It’s a nightmare like all refugees. They rely on Syria and Lebanon and aid organizations for everything. Every thing they eat, drink, all their medicines all have to come from someone else. Even finding an empty and usable bathroom facility is an enormous task. Most Americans are totally and utterly ignorant of the misery they have created.
I was just so ashamed. I mean what happened to the America that made people cry just thinking about the Statue of Liberty? Where did that country go? What happened to the days when we literally knew the words by heart in school ""Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" ?
What happened to the country that defied the Berlin blockade with an airlift?
What happened to the country that regularly gave 1/3 of its grain to aid programs?
What happened that we suddenly march into countries, start wars, botch them and refuse to admit wrong or apologize?
Vietnam really affected my family. We were torn apart over it. But at least America took in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and gave them a home.
Once Americans seemed amazingly generous. Once our streets and prisons weren’t filled with homeless and mentally ill people. Our prisons weren’t the most full in the world.
Once other countries were the torturers.
Once we had the biggest economy and the strongest currency and least debt.
Once our kids were the smartest in the world and our colleges the most sought after.
Once we manufactured more than everyone, and the best quality products. We were number one in so many areas.
Now we’re pariahs. Torturers. War mongers. Profiteers. We put money in front of everything.
And the worst part of it? Most of us don’t even know what we’ve lost. And we’ve certainly lost the will as a people to take control of our government. Our leaders are weak, uneducated, illogical, unprincipled and out of touch with what life as an average American is like.
The media long ago stopped being our advocate and has become a nightmarish monster that feeds on money by supplying a sort of tofu-hamburger helper news- a mix of outright wingnut war mongering propaganda and scandal and fluff and opinion disguised as information. The media in this country is as dangerous to the population as is the government.
I never thought I would ever live to see this country fall from grace and our leaders act so lawlessly. Leaving the caskets out of the news, lying to the public, covering it all up, stealing from everyone.
It just all seems so surreal.
There are days when I drive to work thinking that somewhere across the world in a secret prison, we are holding human beings, torturing them, and meanwhile you and I are at the mall. It amazes me that so many Americans still don’t believe in evolution, and want Bibles in the classroom. But if you asked any of them what the Ten Commandments were, or the first ten amendments of the Constitution, no one would get very far.
There are days that I wait for news that a mighty asteroid has been sighted and it is on an intercept course. And it will kill all of us. Because like Greenspan said the Republicans deserve to lose, I often look at us and think we deserve an asteroid as well. I look at humanity and think that a higher being would probably just think of us as an infection.
There are those that believe that there were many civilizations on Earth that prospered and had high technology yet disappeared in mysterious cataclysms. I think about Walter Miller’s book: A Canticle For Leibowitz. In this book, civilization has been destroyed in a thermonuclear confrontation. The only two things that survive are the Roman Catholic Church and a shopping list for a guy named Leibowitz. He posits that the world is destroyed over and over again.
There are days when I despair and look at us, and think that if I were God and I looked at us, I would recommend a Restart. Maybe even I would take the whole planet to the Apple Store in the sky and get a new hardrive.
New leadership could not come soon enough.