This so sums up how I see/feel it these daze. Even more, the mean spiritedness of the government is scary, IMHO.

""It's Not Your Father's America Any More
by Hubert G. Locke


This country is becoming more unrecognizable with each passing day. The government, we've learned recently, now packages the news. It provides television stations with hundreds of video news releases made up to resemble actual news reports that give us predigested, Orwellian information designed to convince the public that everything in the nation is being well-managed.

Alongside this propaganda circus comes the added revelation that the presidential hops George W. Bush is taking around the country to peddle his case for dismantling Social Security are not conversations with local citizens -- as they are billed -- but carefully arranged events before prescreened audiences who hear presentations from panelists who've been, by the recent admission of one of them, repeatedly rehearsed on what to say.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security issues a doomsday scenario that details the anticipated consequences of a dozen possible terrorist attacks -- complete with body counts and economic damage estimates. The department insists it is not trying to scare the public, although how a report that one would hope would receive the most limited and controlled circulation gets "leaked" to the public is anybody's guess. It just happens, also, to fit well -- and not surprisingly -- with the antics of an administration that has turned promoting and exploiting public fear into an art form that Joseph Goebbels would envy.

The only thing worse than the government these days -- if such is possible -- are those portions of the populace to whom this government owes its allegiance. These are people for whom the country got off on the wrong track a half-century ago when hippies and flower children became symbols of a new, permissive culture and "race relations" -- a euphemism in an era when "colored people" knew their place -- exploded in a civil rights struggle that upset a settled and long-accepted way of life.

Fifty years ago, this aggrieved sector of the nation's populace switched its political allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. This new voting bloc brought with it a set of sentiments and values on matters of personal belief or private opinion that both political parties have long believed ought to remain in the personal, private realm. Mainstream Republicans tried for several decades to ignore these private-agenda matters. But championed by fire-eating evangelists, what are personal and private matters for many of us are now being turned into issues for public regulation and enforcement.

What were -- a generation ago -- matters at the margin of public discussion and debate are now contentions that are being forced to the center of Republican politics and, because it is the party in power, onto the front burner of American public policy.

In the past several weeks, for example, some science museums, mainly in the South, have announced they will no longer show films that discuss evolution, the geology of the Earth or the Big Bang theory for fear of offending people who think such topics contradict the Bible. Topping this enlightening development is the spectacle of the U.S. Congress leaping into the midst of a tragedy confronting a family in Florida faced with deciding whether to end the tube feeding of a 41-year-old woman whom doctors describe as existing in a vegetative state for the past 15 years. Several of the biggest crooks in Congress who face multiple wrongdoing inquiries have managed to deflect attention from their misdeeds by turning this tragedy into a "cause du jour" for the religious right.

We could probably endure all of this if it were only another of the outbursts of cultural passion that Americans periodically undergo in an attempt to assert why we think we're God's gift to the civilized world. The problem is that the people currently in political power in the United States and the people who support them really think we are -- and that's why this country is becoming more unrecognizable with each passing day.

Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

© 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer"
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0325-26.htm

Very apt and very sad.

Yep! It just seems so true! <img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/frown.gif" width=15 height=15>

It doesn't seem to be my America either...

<center><FONT COLOR="#000080">--- Edited 1 times, lastly by Goofus on Apr 09, 2005 ---</FONT></center>

Thanks! That's excellent.

Yep, it's HIS America. <img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/frown.gif" width=15 height=15>

a great piece, highlighting just how far we have fallen with modern Republicans...

Bob Herbert: Imagine a president who spoke of workers' rights
Bob Herbert, New York Times
April 19, 2005 HERBERT0419


Last week -- April 12, to be exact -- was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.

That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the United States has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by FDR. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political Dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.

To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.

After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the United States could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."

Among these rights, he said, are:

"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.

"The right of every family to a decent home.

"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

"The right to a good education."

I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."

Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the 1950s and '60s the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the war in Vietnam and the 1968 election of Richard Nixon.

It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert Dallek has said, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head Start. Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start. But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the leaders of the GOP gang (the members should all wear masks) that has executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to the very rich.

Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.

The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.

"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to FDR and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?