The Irony Is Killing Me. We Are Becoming Them And They Want To Be Like Us.

[Solomon]

I know two people that used to be my friends. The reason that they used to be my friends is one night we were having a discussion and they started advocating nuking the entire Middle East. (except for Israel, somehow)

I couldn't believe it, but they were dead serious. And they are so-called liberal lawyers no less.

Their reasoning was that it is too late for this generation of Arabs. They have been taught to hate America so the only solution is to just wipe out the whole generation, lock stock and barrel.

I was flabergasted. "What about all the innocent men, women and children, millions of them, what have they done to you that you feel the need to commit genocide?" I cried.

"Well,they harbored the Taliban,for one thing". I was told. "Who harbored the Taliban?" I asked. "Every man,woman and child in the Middle East?" "And what has the Taliban done to you?"

I became so sick to my stomach that I told them I had to leave and stormed out of there.

Americans are so arrogant that we are fast becoming the most ignorant people on the planet. If a guy has a foreign name or an accent, we don't want to hear or read what he has to say. After all, we live in the Gawd damn best country in the whirel, right? They should be listening to us, not the other way around.

If Americans took the time to read a book, about Iran for example, instead of listening to the drivel from the media, they might discover that the people over there are for the most part, just like us. They want to put food on their table and they want to be free.

We like to brag about the fact that the rest of the world knows that the American people are not the same as the American government. Yet we don't acknowledge that about other people. Everytime a radical Arab blows something up, they think the Arab people will rise up in revolution. But it never happens. Why? Because the average Arab is just like us. They don't fall for that shit.

Right now in Iran for example, as in other Middle Eastern countries, there is a war going on inside those countries between the youth, who want democracy, and free expression, on the one hand, and the religio-authoritarianism of their governments on the other. In other words, they are striving to become what they think we are.

I say what they "think" we are, because we are not us anymore. The torch has passed. It has passed to all the countries that we hate. Every country that is trying to institute real democracy, we hate. We were the model for democracy, freedom and human rights.

And now we are becoming what we think they are. Religio-authoritarianists. You can even see it right here on DU. If you don't obey a cop's order quick enough, then hell, they have the right the beat the shit out of you, taze you, break your arms, kill you even. Authority must be obeyed without question. Doesn't matter if they're wrong, our first duty is to obey.

And our "leaders" just won't give up the idea of forcing religion into government. It took more than a thousand years of evolution to divorce church and state, and they want to go backwards.

Oh, the irony is so bitter. We like to brag about the "American Ideal". But now it can be seen very clearly, that we never owned it in the first place. It passed for a time through us, inherited from the struggles of other people,and now sadly it is moving on. So even now, no matter how bad we sully the ideal, trash it, betray it, it still lives on. But it lives in other peoples of the world. So sad.

And now I'll just put on my flack jacket while people indignantly tell me that it still belongs to America. That I'm just being a pessimist and doomsayer. We're going to get it back, right?
We were going to get it back in 2002. We were going to get it back in 2004. We said we got it back in 2006. Yeah right. Sure we did. We let a sitting Vice President shoot a man in the face and then obstruct justice. Democrats are in power but nobody is pursuing the crime. They ignore subpoenas, constitutional rights, and any damn thing else they want to ignore.

Don't get in my face and ask me what I'm doing about it. I get in the streets and march too but the only real thing that I can do and the only thing that ought to be necessary for me to do is cast my damn vote. My vote either gets discarded and not counted, or I win and the people I cast votes for are gutless to do anything.

I apologize in advance for the rant.