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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/4/11

I Want My Country Back!

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Follow Me on Twitter     Message Jill Jackson

Lies to the Left of me, Lies to the Right, Here I Am, Sunk in the Middle Class with you.    (With apologies to Stealers Wheel.)

I want to go home.   Enough of this Twilight Zone parallel universe.   Let me out of this David Lynch nightmare.   I'm desperate to escape these Gulliver islands and sail home to the land in which I'd always thought I'd lived.   But I'm lost--and, even with GPS, I can't find it anywhere.   I miss my country!   It seems to be forever gone"

My memories are fading--I must share them before they slip away completely.   The land I knew was my land.   And your land.   Tall, snow capped mountains; fields of golden grain; white picket fences and a chicken in every pot.   Rocky California ocean vistas, and lush, colorful New England forests.   The roiling Mississippi and the flowering Gulf.   An Eden we believed was in our reach.

Our neighborhoods were warm, and cozy, and safe.   We'd ride our bikes and kick our cans until the call for dinner, and some family time laughing at a silly comedy on the radio or TV.   Jobs were from 9 to 5, and 40 hours a week for 25 years was rewarded with a house, transportation, comprehensive health insurance, a strong and effective village infrastructure, excellent public schools, and affordable higher education.   Entrepreneurs were admired--but their fruits were monitored and regulated with a steeply progressive tax schedule to ensure that greed didn't trump the greater good.   Newcomers, invited and welcomed to our shores by Lady Liberty, had a good chance of climbing up the social ladder to the middle class--and staying there.

Except for a brief McCarthy "illness', we felt blessed to have a free press, freedom of movement, and freedom of speech.   Police states were for the other side of the Iron Curtain--our country represented   the pinnacle of human development, an enlightened, humanitarian, comfortable society.   I believed in Santa Claus then, and the Easter Bunny.   Even in God.   And, especially, in our Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the framework of our country, and the public spirit and service of those leading us from our nation's capital and our state government.     I miss having something to believe in any more.

Yes, adulthood brings out the retrospectoscope.   My memories were just as manufactured and manipulated as the images we are fed from the MSM today.   Native Americans whose families were murdered and lands were stolen, African Americans who suffered mightily under the chains of slavery and the discrimination of Jim Crow.   Women trapped in their homes and roles, breaking out only to find that the workforce added responsibilities to their overburdened lives.   An elite empire   that lived off the fruits of labor and resources of many others at home and abroad--who were "too poor to matter".   The Norman Rockwell paintings in which some of us lived turned out to be as unreal as reality television.   Not only are those worlds gone--they never really existed at all.

The revolutions of the past 30 years have let us peek around the curtain behind which we are all imprisoned.   We know now that we have no rights, no empowerment, no democracy.   We are but pawns in a global oligarchy that more and more sees us as unnecessary and expendable, so much so that they make little effort to "keep up the pretenses" that our participation is important and that our future is of their concern.   As the corporate fascist world order continues to expand like a voracious malignancy, energized by both the "left" and the "right", and powered by billions of global workers indentured by poverty, we become burdens and obstacles for the true elite, valued only for the "food" we can bring to their greedy maws, then cast aside to die before we can ask for recompense.

My ship's anchor is stuck in the mire, and I cannot escape.   Would that I could set out to sea and find once again the emerald isle where love, caring, kindness, wisdom, compassion and humanitarianism reign.   Would that I could find that country in which I was deluded to believe I'd grown up in, and very much would like to revisit for my waning years and to guarantee a brighter future for my children and their peers.   Why has human psychopathy, sociopathy, greed, and sadism destroyed that vision and drowned us in such a sewer of cruelty and hate?

We're not stupid, Washington.  We won't get fooled again.

We know you've won"

 

 

 

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Jill Jackson is a practitioner of kindness and common sense. Unlike her cat, she prefers to think out of the box.

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