It is the calamity du jour tour and today it is coming to your hometown.
Whether propelled by the forces of nature or by man, it feels like we are taking turns demonstrating just how wrong, wrong can be.
By comparison to events in Japan, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and many other places who have played host to a maelstrom, a shutdown of 'non-essential' government services seems petty and inconsequential. But inconsequential as it may be, it is our inconsequential and we are trying our best to make sure that inconsequential does as much destruction as possible.
So the eyes of the world will turn, for just the briefest instant, in our direction, before each nation living in the midst of its own disaster, will be forced by circumstance to focus on its own monumental concerns. And in that instant when their eyes light upon the mess we have created for ourselves, they will undoubtedly wonder how we have managed, by our own hands, to bring the machinery of this country to a grinding halt. In the midst of the tears that the calamity du jour tour has brought to each of them, they may force a brief smile and a shake of the head. It is but the United States being their dysfunctional worst.
Tomorrow the calamity du jour tour will head off to find yet another victim. We can only hope that soon the tour will end and we will collectively be able to start to clean up the mess. Everything, good and bad, seems to run in cycles, whether on the smallest or largest of landscapes. Congratulations to those on the right who are so wrong and absolutely directly responsible for making our country home to the tour. You have proven by the enormity of your shortcomings, coupled with the power that you have so abused, that you are deserving of everything I, and most of the rest of the world, are now thinking about you.
4 comments:
Thanks to the Wall Street bankers, the Tea Party and cable TV personalities, we have become a nation of 100 small ideas rather than one big vision. We are fractured today more so than during our Viet-Nam days. Whent he government shuts down this evening we should wake up the next day and realize that we can no longer fight expeditionary wars in the mid-East, run an appropriate social safety net, legislate a good and proper health care system for our own citizens nor take even one reasonable step toward ending our dependence upon foreign oil. We are falling and failing. There is time to recover. Do we have the will? Do we have the intellect?
We are certainly less than we are capable of being. We have allowed the conversation to be directed and dictated by those with small minds and small ideas.
About that divorce you spoke of, can we keep NYC?
You know, I had a specific thought on that topic. I figured that we would divide up the states in the country like you would divide the contents of a house in a divorce, ie you take one, then I take one, until we have gone through all 50 states.
You would get 1 state for each 2% of the vote you received. If the red got 48% of the vote they would get to choose 24 states, and the blue (with 52%) would get 26 states.
I wondered, would NY be the first state chosen (big buildings, big banks, big money) or the last (big buildings, big banks, big money)
By the way, I see this as a movie, the election of what country you want to live in.
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