inaction jacksons

Let me state this unequivocally at the start: I am ashamed of my country. Why is this so? Isn't America still the greatest democracy in the world? Don't I appreciate the material comforts and advantages that the wealth and power of this nation allow me?

The answer to all these questions is yes - but a very qualified yes because I can't help but think that all these advantages come at a steep price - and that price seems to be getting higher every year, especially for those of us in the middle and poorer classes. Here's some reckoning that I've done in trying to tally up these costs; and the effect these costs have on the vast majority of Americans, not to mention our fellow sisters and brothers around the world:

• Champions of Torture: there is no two ways about this - our country is the poster child for hypocrisy when it comes to torture and human rights. We condemn others for doing it but demand that our own government retain the right to torture when it deems it necessary. This path cannot lead anywhere but straight down the ethical tube where many other governments, both democratic and dictatorial are sure to follow.

  "Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil.
  The issue has become urgent because Bush has chosen to demand the legal right to torture anyone he wishes. " - from Fred Branfman: On Torture and Being "Good Americans," Mar 3, 2006 [http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_32376.shtml]

• Polluters, Inc.: the U.S. is and has been for a while the biggest polluter in the world of the air we all breathe and the water and land we all depend on collectively for our sustenance. China and India are quickly catching up, be we still lead the pack, especially if you look at it from a per capita perspective. Our massive consumption culture and demand for cheap, disposable foreign goods drives other nations to support massive and unregulated industry and development for short-term profits (for the rich - the poor never see these benefits). It almost goes without saying that these decisions are to the detriment of creating an international culture of responsible stewardship for our environment. Just go over to some of the industrialized provinces in China and try to breathe, and instead feel the toxicants in the air all around you and burning through your lung cavities to see this kind of result; or look at the blooming of asthma and many other diseases in the children residing in our own communities that happen to sit next to any number of industry sites. And the fact is that our democratically elected leaders and the vast army of highly-paid corporate lobbyists lapping at their feet are doing everything they can to head off any sort of grassroots environmental justice or pro-environment movement here and abroad, despite widespread popular support for them.
• Masters of Virtual Warfare: officially sanctioned killing in the name of your nation is no longer a personal, face-to-face thing - soldiers rarely see the eyes of their enemy; many soldiers, and most certainly the American public, no longer see or have the option of thinking about the deadly consequences that war has on a people, their lands and culture because they are only obeying orders and struggling to stay alive and complete increasingly unrealistic missions. So the real onus lies with the leadership, which, being so distant from the actual war, has no problem using tactics like "shock and awe"; dropping 500 pound units of mass terror and death from miles above with just enough precision to allow the spin-meisters the luxury of giving negative outcomes cute little names that de-personalize the realities of death, like "collateral damage" and "smart bombs." The American public, already with much of its attention diverted towards everyday personal financial struggles and endless varieties of mindless entertainment, doesn't notice that all media coverage of war is scrubbed clean of anything that would make them think twice about it or feel strongly that they should take some responsibility for the actions of our government.
• Prophets of Profit: we preach the culture of consumer capitalism and blind devotion to this idol of competition like snake-oil salesmen. American-style capitalism will be the new world religion if the industrial-world leaders and their multi-national corporate masters get their way. These people will deny the efficacy of evolution and it's ancillary "survival of the fittest" ethos until they're red in the face, but they still insist that national salvation lies in the rigged system of "to the strongest go the spoils" that is at the heart of unbridled free-market capitalism. As long as the losers of that competition can be kept quiet and out of view of the public...

Some may read into what I have written here as a call for some sort of socialist state or even communism - perhaps thats true in a very limited respect, yes - but that is not the point. The point is that regardless of what system of government we support, if that system is not fully steeped in truth and openness and a belief in the equality of all life on this planet, then that system has been corrupted from the beginning and is probably destined to end up on the dung heap with the rest of history's fallen civilizations.

I still believe our system of checked and balanced government (minus some of the emphasis on blind capitalism and profit) can go forward positively and to the benefit of all, but only when the participants in that system fight as a collective to maintain those underlying beliefs. And to my reading of history, we have perhaps never found ourselves farther away from that ideal than today.