Hypocritical Times
We're living in hypocritical times. We are aware that the US went into heavy deficits four years ago. The Bush administration has taken us to two wars - one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq, but never saw a need to call for any personal sacrifice to carry the debtload of hundreds of millions of dollars each day. Instead of calling for sacrifice, tax breaks have been legislated for the benefit of the richest. Through our need to borrow, our own economy has come to depend on the kindness of communist nations like China to pay for our elective wars which we claim will "make the world safe for democracy." Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor has widened. Poverty in America is on the rise while the Bush economy grows, taking on third-world characteristics. We see a staggering amount of concentrated wealth that recalls to us the memory of the pre-Depression days. Hurricane Katrina literally blew the lid off the issue of poverty and washed away the illusion that we didn't know that the problem of poverty existed. The truth is, we didn't act because we didn't want to look, as Sen John Edwards eloquently said today in his Center for American Progress speech on "Restoring the American Dream." The $3.oo per gallon we pay at the pump for our gas is a personal sacrifice - but only for the oil companies.
I want to know what happened to the America where caring citizens shared common traditional values and worked for the common good? Just about any issue you examine today leaves you with a sense that you're living as an island - in a vacuum where everything your leadership is telling you they're doing raises a distinct sense of hypocrisy when you look at the actual outcome of their actions.
Americans thirst for community - and they're becoming increasingly tired of the kind of political hypocrisy where one thing comes out of the President's lips, and another thing happens altogether.
