We are Safer--Part One

After the recent reincarnation of Mr. Potter (DICK Cheney), the dish "he is making the nation less safe" has been on the menu.

"Less-safe"...uhmmm...let's see, if you were living in New Orleans; if you went to work in the towers on 9/11; if you are young, under-educated and were unemployed so you joined the Guard and now find yourself in the Iraqi-quagmire for tour number 4; if you happened to be sitting on a porch, in church, in a store, etc. when a recently unemployed, gun-toting neighbor lost it and unloaded round after round until many were left dead, then yes, our nation has become "unsafe".

We should consider the fact that not once in the last 100 years--and really many more--had world opinion been so against us, the American nation and our grand experiment. On 9/12, the entire world, except for a handful of fanatics in caves and ghettoes in some Muslim nations--mostly nations that had been at war or been victimized by Israel--was so sympathetic toward our suffering--suffering which really was miniscule compared to what our government has supported in military dictatorships in Latin and South America.

The world wanted us/needed us and prayed for us to succeed, to recover. Learning I was an American, a woman cried in a hotel in Italy. A bouncer in Belgium beat up an Irish drunk for yelling how grateful he had been that 9/11 had happened. In Munich, the walking street near the City Administration building overflowed with candles, flowers and posters of support such that it was unpassable in spots.

Very quickly, however, the myopic, the arrogant, the prejudiced, the overly-religious and the Republicans started to abuse our nation, our good-will, the good-will of the world by "treading" on the rights of the world; by wiping the bloodied faces of the tortured with our Constitution--a masterpiece on par with anything Michaelangelo had ever done!

Foolishly, ignorantly, like a group of kids raiding the liquor cabinet while the parents are at Bingo and mixing things like Anisette and vodka, bourbon with rum, our nation, the world woke up with a screaming hangover; and even worse, the fun of the drunk was never appreciated because it was as if the concoction had been funneled into us.

Less safe: our infrastructure is in a shambles and we have no money to pay for it so we must go deeper and deeper into debt to the Chinese. Our wealth has been frittered away in the desert fighting a nation that had nothing to do with whether the average American was living more or less safely, happily.

The surpluses created by President Clinton through aggressive budget balancing were handed out to the wealthy in scenes of corporate and rich-people welfare (massive, unjustified tax cuts) never before realized; the welfare given to the rich in the past 10 years has proven to be more costly to our nation's future than the welfare that has been given to the poor since 1965. At least those poor people reinvested a lot of that money back into their communities via purchases; in some way or another these poor Americans educated and raised sons and daughter.

From the moment the Republicans took control of our nation, government stopped governing and it started preaching; those in charge started forcing upon us their personal views of how we should live our lives; a bunch of southern hypocrites who, through manipulation of their built-in excuse that they are "weak sinners", allow themselves to commit any act of treachery against anyone and usually against the interests of our national good and usually wholly in line with the interests of their groups of white friends at the country club, have wasted our national wealth; but, so long as they pray, go to church and drop "Lord Jesus" into every third sentence, they are always righteous.

And, while government wasn't governing things were happening. Storms were brewing, natural and financial, bolts were weaking, rails were rusting, troops were being shorted their body armor, the skies were being polluted, parks were being drilled, fanatics were training in Iraq, Russia was manipulating it's gas power, China was buying the world and our nation was heading for a fall; and, it fell and guess who was in charge of our nation? Yes, the Republicans, Bush, Dick, Rummy and others.

Are we safer today than we were one year ago? With W. out of the White House and Cheney not a heart beat away anymore, yes, we are.