A long way to go to get back to our American dreams

I wrote this as a warning five years ago September. The situation has only gotten worse since then.

I'm getting sick and tired of the way this country has changed in the last 20 years or so, and not the least of which is that we seem to revel in wallowing in the past.

Today was the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and of course there were ceremonies in plenty of different places honoring those who died and swearing eternal enmity against those who committed the attacks.

So what?

This used to be a country that looked to the future. This used to be a country that shrugged off its failures and mistakes and said that it was all right, that tomorrow would be better -- because we are Americans and we believe in the future.

America the pitiful

Hell, I can't find anyone who really thinks about the future anymore. The future in this country is so damn frightening that conservatives want us to go back to the '50s and liberals want us to go back to the '60s.

Politicians still lie to us when they say they believe our greatest days are ahead of us, but that's only because -- as Jack Nicholson so famously said in "A Few Good Men" -- we can't handle the truth.

The truth is that we got fat, stupid and lazy. We were content to stop making things. We convinced ourselves that the future was all about the information economy, and we started paying people fabulous sums of money for doing nothing more than moving money around.

We turned into the damn Eloi, and it says plenty about our country that a lot of you will have no idea what that means.


We turned into the characters in Mike Judge's "Idiocracy," where we laugh at folks getting hit in the head, or farting, or just being really embarrassed by their clumsiness or stupidity.

Yes, more than 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001, but that's less than 6 percent of the casualties we suffered during the Vietnam War, and it's less than 3 percent of the number of dead Iraqi civilians since we invaded that hapless country.

Time is running out.

I am sick and tired of people who get all their political knowledge from loudmouths, whether they're named Limbaugh or Olbermann, Beck or Schultz. The average person on the street can't even name their damn congressman, but they're quick to have uninformed opinions about the world.

We're in a mess to end all messes financially, and it's because we want more from our government than we're willing to pay for.

Republicans insist we should cut spending and not raise taxes, but have you noticed they never say WHERE they would cut spending?

There's really only one place to make significant savings, and that's in the defense budget. But they won't cut there because that's where their people are getting rich. 

We ought to end the war tomorrow.

We ought to end all tax breaks for corporations and dare them to go overseas.

We ought to raise the retirement age to 70 and end the payroll tax cap. Boom, Social Security and Medicare are fixed, just like that.

But we won't, of course. We're too addicted to rhetoric and solutions that will never work.

Best days ahead of us? Not hardly. We're circling the drain of history unless we change, and there are three things we need to do.

... no way to go through life

We need to slim down, literally and figuratively.

We need to get smarter.

We need to work harder.

We need to change fat, stupid and lazy into thin, smart and hard working, and we need to demand a fair shake from the folks with all the money.

This isn't about the government helping anyone. It's about us telling the people we work for that if they don't start treating us fairly, we're going to go all Samson on them and tear down the walls.

We don't need a revolution against the government. And that's the lesson I'm taking away from 9/11/10.

Walt Kelly was right. We have met the enemy -- and it is US.