Dark Ages in America: Now?

We seem to be moving again in that direction in this country. We have a wealthy class who are above the law, and never held personally accountable for their actions…their companies’ pay the fines, and write off the costs as a tax break. They are the one percent who have accumulated the majority of the wealth of this country. In fact, the richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of us combined.

They buy the elections for a ruling élite. Politicians whose campaigns are funded by mega donors and political action committees (PACs). These are people whole believe they are entitled to positions of power, and somehow manage to accumulate significant wealth from a job with a modest public sector salary.

And then there is “us,” the rapidly diminishing middle class and poor. Somewhere between 47 million and 50 million people live below the poverty line in America today. 3.5 million People experience homelessness each year. 23% of those are U.S. Military Veterans, and most alarmingly, 35% of the homeless population is made up of families with children.

Yet this great country, this country that solved the mysteries of the atom, put men on a distant celestial body, and created, at one time, an economy the envy of the world, cannot solve these problems. And why can’t we? It’s because we are busy in a rush to the past.

We are electing leaders based on the choices of 1%, and they get us to vote against our own interests by creating imagined threats to religious liberties, and gun rights, and other culture issues. We elect leaders who appeal to our base emotions. We scorn people educated and thoughtful, and elect the person who can most deny reality. We continue to re-elect people caught up in prostitution and financial scandals, who then proceed to lecture the rest of us on “family values” and “morality.”

We don’t understand our form of government, and seem willing to elect politicians who also don’t have a complete understanding of how our government works, nor the intent of our founders. We have people who don’t even know who their elected officials are, and do not realize we are NOT a democracy, but a Republic.

We deny science. The majority of Americans no longer believe in evolution as the origin of life on our planet, but apparently believe in some religious fairy tale that has no scientific support. As one meme put it, Creationism is believing that Kirk Cameron, a childhood actor, knows more than esteemed physicist, Stephen Hawking. All credible scientists tell us we are warming our planet to dangerous degree, yet the 1%, to continue to support their place at the top of the heap, pay for bogus research to deny the inevitable, observable science, and claim there are differences in the science. In some states, we have non-scientist governors prohibiting the use of accepted scientific terms, such as climate change and global warming…as if ignoring it somehow makes it not true.

We allow our political leaders to de-fund education and cut teacher salaries, then let them convince us that our schools are failing our children, so we must pay private corporations to educate them. They blame it on greedy teachers and their unions, and we fall for it. Rather than holding educators in the esteem they deserve, we allow politicians to convince us they are all bad, as if, in every one of our lives, there weren’t teachers who touched our spirits and fired or imaginations and ingenuity. But we go along for some reason.