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The New American Slaves

Message Andrea Zelenka
Waiting in a hospital lab's sitting room on a sunny spring day in late April 2009, I was thinking about what would happen after the test results were read. At my age genetics had kicked in and I knew that I'd eventually have to face a doctor who would want me to ingest corporately produced and government approved chemical cocktails that might possibly be toxic and/or lethal. Television commercials and magazine advertisements with very long lists of potential pharmaceutically induced side effects came to mind too. As I waited I also hoped that my research into my physical condition and treatment with a holistic approach would pay off. Of course the out-of-pocket expense, my insurance deductible and stagnant wages came into question too. Then I wondered how much longer I would have a job. I wondered if I was actually lucky to have insurance that I could ill afford to actually use.

Welcome to the US of A. The daunting financial aspect of healthcare concerns is shared by the majority. We live in a time when the jobs provided by manufacturing and services that were our basis for prosperity have been relocated. It is a time when workers' unions and employment rights have gone the way of the mastodon. The populace has watched as their collective tax funded coffers were raided just prior to the Bush Administration's departure. We have witnessed the same unconstitutional crime of taxation without representation being imposed upon us again and again. Our children's future has been ripped asunder by our step into indentured servitude to money lenders and corporate masters. We might as well don our white arm bands to indicate our slavery.

Adding to our dour situation, our new president has not repealed any of the surveillance laws that took away our civil liberties and our right to due process of law and a day in court if needed. The Continuity of Government directive is still in effect. The boots can still hit our streets and the police state is still a threat because open martial law is still allowable per the legislation that was put into effect under the crime ridden reign of Bush and Cheney. Considering the violence and destruction that usually ensues after pervasive poverty and oppression have taken root, and factoring in the current state of the US economy, our eroded protections and freedoms and the intrusion into privacy should be of concern. Will there come a day when the radical faction of the gun rights activist groups feel so threatened by their own government that they come out with all barrels blasting and give reason for military intervention? Or will there be a day when the military starts breaking down the entrances to our homes to take the guns and the dissenters?

Who knows? At the rate that we are poisoning ourselves and our planet, there might not be a lot of us with guns and ammo left around in the near future. We eat unhealthy foods, breathe poisoned air, drink and bathe in dirty microbe infested drug laden water, and appear to have a penchant for man-made drugs that either help us escape reality or provide new disease manifestations for the medical-pharmaceutical complex to use to drive us into foreclosure on our homes. GMO's are not our friends either. And some of us have noticed the strange cloud and/or jet exhaustion formations in our skies that are being referred to as chemtrials that call for further investigation of what is in our atmosphere. The corporate control of the food supply is another not so pro-human condition to find ourselves in. It allows for pricing, supply, nutritional value and level of threat to life of our sustenance to be dictated by monopolies for profit.

The mood in America amongst the working population has become cautious and somber to say the least. Conversations about the economy and lack of affordable healthcare have become commonplace in a country that otherwise appears all too apathetic towards politics and the plight of others as a norm. Talk of equal justice for all and prosecution for crimes perpetrated by the past Administration has invaded the check-out lines and office water cooler gatherings. What might appear to be self-pity to the less fortunate is indicative of a newly dissatisfied and agitated society who has come realize the consequences of their prior habits in rampant consumerism and apathy towards government policies. Will this unrest and unhappiness lead to a grand non-partisan populist movement to demand a return to a prior time of real freedom and prosperity for all Americans? Or will we just complain amongst our peers and wait to see if the NRA nuts and Klan start the wrong revolution for the wrong reasons?

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
- Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World

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AZ entered the working world in 1980 after college and after many career changes, she became employed in the construction industry. Starting out as an accounting clerk and fill-in salesperson she eventually became a division manager in a (more...)
 
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