Right now as we speak Juarez is a war zone. The violence is so widespread that you have to wonder how long Mexico can continue to exist in this way. The people causing the trouble are drug cartels who sell us drugs, and buy guns from us and get them smuggled back south, then use those weapons to kill civilans, police, and soldiers.
We are their marketplace. The drug war is over us. And in this moment, though people are somewhat aware of the problem, this issue is completely and utterly dwarfed by our concern over our economy.
Less than 8 years ago, George Bush Jr. went up for reelection. It was known by the end of his first term that there were no WMD's in Iraq. Lots of people know that 4000 of our men died in Iraq. Far fewer people are aware that something like a million Iraqi's were killed and a massive number of them fled the country leaving a country shattered.
And then we re-elected him.
You can blame voting booth irregularities if you like, but the truth is, it never should have been that close anyway. There should be a price for starting a war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but he didn't have to pay the obvious price.
And there is a reason for that. Christian conservative may like to say that we are a christian country, but it isn't true. We have a different god, and that god is money.
Today, large sections of the evironment are becoming corrupted. We've put so much crap into the air that the planet is slowly warming, and its effecting our foot output every year. Much of the country doesn't believe, and most of them haven't bothered to read any of the data about it. But they are informed daily of small shifts in the economy, as the rate of those seeking employment rises by 0.1%, or falls by the same amount in as little as 4 weeks.
I'm not a socialist incidentally, I think that a free market economy is a good thing, so long as there is some regulation. But I think there is something sick and abnormal about the extent of our greed.
In the end, our elections are about one thing, and one thing alone. The economy. Nothing else matters.