Looking Back, Looking Forward

The Bush administration elevated the art of Orwellian "Newspeak" to new heights... or depths. Rather than actually deal with anything, we merely redefined our issues into less politically-charged terms, spinning our language so that hunger became very low food security, domestic spying became terrorist surveillance, wholesale theft of our rights was called the Patriot Act, and imperial adventurism was called, without a hint of irony, the War On Terror. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and almost 5,000 Americans have killed in a war based on deliberately falsified information, trumped-up charges of Weapons of Mass Destruction that insiders knew never existed. The national debt has swelled trillions dollars in only a few years, with most of that going to a few wealthy Republicans in the defense and finance industries, while the middle-class is left to pay for this fiscal debacle - one of the largest single transfers of wealth in the history of humankind. The professional paranoia crowd kept us stupid and afraid by blaring the word "terror" every chance they got, and at the same time we were told that we were safer than we ever were, so shut up and shop. Our educational system has been deliberately degraded by a wealthy plutocracy that wants us capable of working, but not capable of independent thought - critical thinking is not a component of an educational model that teaches to the test. A university education, which has the potential to teach people how to think, is now all but out of reach of reach for the common folk unless they're willing to assume crushing debt, and credit laws are tightened to the point of ensuring the non-wealthy a life of fiscal serfdom.

The recent election put a bit of hope back in the picture, but remaining skeptical is a healthy point of view. Big corporations still own a good chunk of Congress, and their agenda will always remain the same. Ironically, an old Cold War-era phrase popular with the right wing now comes to mind..."Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." Never has it been more true than today.