Sunday, August 9th, 2009...9:36 pm
USA Entitlement Program… Sunday Morning Magical Thinking
Please indulge me for a few moments:
The US is entitled to all of the resources it can score. The US is entitled to live wastefully, by dint of its hard work. The US can shut out its neighbors, walling their millenniums-old migration away by virtue of exclusive nationalism. The purity of goodness in our nation entitles each of us to practice a nationalistic identity over one that is universal. The US is entitled to enjoy itself mindlessly while children starve in foreign lands, as long as it salves its conscience from time to time by reaching down into its pockets, past the wallet for to spare some loose change, because, after all, what can really be done?? Besides, it is not our fault that we are first in line at the world’s trough. The US is entitled to practice autonomy from the rest of Earth’s citizens. By dint of its extreme virtue, it can unilaterally bomb foreign civilian populations, (like those in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan,) as it sees proper, slaughtering people with machines by the thousands. And it can ordain other nations, (like Israel,) with any of these same rights.
All the world is interdependent. All economic booms are either expensive (they expend/waste) or inflated (full of nothing, borrowing from the future.) In a closed system (Earth,) there are no gains to be made, but the existential gain of harmony, towards which we are not advancing.
These Sunday morning dingalings—the David Brooks’s, the Cokie Roberts’, the George Snuffleupagus’s—whose function it is to present us US citizens the menu choices we have politically are like those images you can only see if you cross your eyes. They are not real. Their world is not real. It is all an invention that, elementally, fails the loving ideal.
Not that they lead. They follow along helplessly as we all do. Their job is to paint mythological word pictures to make it all seem sensible. Like the first primate to discover a tree moved not because the wind was blowing, but because there was some Great Person up in the sky who decided to make it move.
Sunday morning magical thinking.
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