Why We Are a Backward Country

Okay we’re not actually backward, but we are our country that idolizes our roots as a society that conquered the wilderness . We dream of that single brave family rushing west and claiming a free homestead. That rugged individual, who actually existed but has been mythologized out of all reality as what made America Great in the first place. This is simply false. Life was hard and short. People travelled west in groups, and disease and massacres and failures, social and economic took a major toll. Success was rare. As for America’s great industrialists, they worked people to death or until illness threw them out on the streets and into poverty. They destroyed our ecology they created conditions where water was ruined and where the dust bowl of the 30s became inevitable. What actually made America great was the activist policies of presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. Those men knew that American freedom could only be great when we took care of each other and our natural environment. Paul Krugman said it better than I can in today’s New York Times. He argues that a certain segment of the population views any regulation no matter how beneficial as an infringement on that pioneer spirit which it has idolized out of all recognition. He notes that Hobbes said such a society is nasty and brutish. I would say it’s not a society at all. It’s a collection of individuals who happen to occupy the same land mass, and who can do whatever no matter how much it hurts everyone else. It’s not civilization and it’s surely not great. Just ask those young coal miners that Trump touts because they got jobs. Black lung disease is on the rise while safety regulations are being wiped out, and healthcare becomes less available and more costly.

I have Trump’s CPAC speech on now. I see him whipping up his crowd into a frenzy as he talks about himself in glowing terms. He spouts lies, and diminishes fellow Americans who disagree with him. He is a hooligan in a business suit, and sadly this ignoramus who never cracked a book is our leader. I watch him MAL...Make America Less.

“A RISING TIDE FLOATS ALL BOATS”