Thread: Are we on a fast train to doom and gloom?

Bowden: Are we on a fast train to doom and gloom?

9:00 PM, Aug. 12, 2011

The world we know is answer-less to questions that chosen leaders fail to answer, mainly because events swirl in such speed the old traditional norms and accepted values are trapped within the crosscurrents and deadly political greed of a new, unsettling age.

Don't ask for answers, for you and me, like Barack Obama, like the loose herd of failed politicians called Congress, have none. We're puny voices trying to goose elected leaders into courage. Forget get-your-back-up ideology drawn from long dead philosophers. Return to work for the people.

For Obama and Congress, it's paid vacation time, summer basking in moments of pleasure and, by the way, politicking to heighten the money flow, despite suffering of the wounded all around them. Besides, Washington leaders of both parties, factions, spinoffs and dominating lobbying armies in the power-grab are absorbed in the never-ending running-for-re-election. You know, the big-bucks-per-dinner-plate treadmill burning up their energy while fattening their egos.

Never mind that the nation bumps up against one of the hardest rocks of the age amid many hard places. How can it be, a great nation — champion of democratic institutions, free market, world innovator — downgraded in a world of downgrades and low grades, the grand republic frayed by scorched-earth debt, two wars burning up American monetary and human resources without end? And it's vacation time for the exalted few. Response on Palafox Street and up in Jeff Miller's inept Washington likely would be like spitting in the ocean.

Most of us, snug in our creature comforts, watching old institution walls crumble, worried the wolf may sneak up to our door, are muted by calamities we cannot control — a nation once glorified for magnificent successes, a model of others cherishing the emotions expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Many of us think "We the People" is the preamble for making the nation aright when the moronic elected stumble in their self-serving motivations. Our problem rests in too few elections. Moments to vote are limited by Big Money exalting only a few who can afford to run, and we must climb hurdles erected by the moneyed party system, a system feeding the mighty becoming mightier.


All about us, blaring electronics media trumpet doom; self-anointed celebrities hawk opinions and easy blame in the power game for your disgust or cheering amusement. Celebrated voices prosper on invented turmoil. Many take anthill events of little importance to the mountain peak of audience-building.

Much airway rhetoric is manufactured to solicit an audience, to merchandise, to feed prejudices, to juice the thermostat of gross divisiveness. A Nation of Talk out-strides a Nation of Do; a nation's soul is stomped by heel marks of redundant disgust. Still, we awaken to the reality that retirement savings swirl in shadows of despair, hopelessness and fear of bankruptcy grip once-stalwart institutions. Many jobless and saddened families are trapped within escalating, frightening statistics lighting electronic boards watched dutifully by money changers. Senseless mobs ignite streets in blazes of anarchy in many foreign lands.

But this is America, folks, where leaders take vacations in the face of doom. Many blessings bestowed on Americans keep hope a burning torch, despite leadership blunders. A free society, a world leader, should do better, much better. Still storms come and go, with an unanswered question: Will sanity return before the Great Decline dooms us to another dark age?

http://www.pnj.com/article/20110813/OPI ... NTPAGE%7Cs

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Will sanity return before the Great Decline dooms us to another dark age?

No.