Reply #64: Enjoy your bitterness...

[whathehell]

I criticize this country because I care about the country, and what great things it can do and has done.

Our superpower status is not an irony. It is a result of history and the cold war, when the U.S. was the only political entity able to mobilize the resources to resist Stalin and the Soviet Union. Now we have to wrestle with the resulting military-industrial interests in order to remain true to our founding ideals.

Sure, a corporate tool managed to get elected president and set up policies of torture and pre-emptive war, but he was replaced by a different man who represents in his person the culmination of the social changes that began with the end of slavery. The election of Obama sent a signal to the world that we can be different.

This country IS in a mess. Changes are difficult to make, and when changes occur, they are incomplete due to the entrenched interests that resist those changes. Health insurance reform is a good example of this. Yet it is change non-the-less. I have been an active critic on this blog of the lack of single payer or a public option, but I like to think that my criticism is well intended. I will not surrender to hopeless bitterness. I will continue to argue for energy reform, climate change legislation, labor reform and many other things. I will be critical because I know that we are still capable of improvement.

Good luck to you. Maybe you can find hope some day ... or somewhere else.