Post Bush 43: Day IV
There's an old saying: Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Well, in my humble estimation, I think our country feels bitten by our government to which we have fed millions of dollars while it destroyed our standing in the world and in the eyes of over half its citizenry.
It takes seeing what a mess everything is to understand (with cold certitude) that just about everything in our domestic arena has been ignored over the last eight years. Ours has become a administration focused on one thing: oil and the dollars it moves abroad. Of course, that's way over simplified. Oil has become the root of all our evils: high food prices, joblessness due to outsourcing, increased terrorism in the world, lack of funds for domestic programs, the outrageous deficit that neither I nor my children will likely ever see paid in full, oh, and yeah, the hundreds of thousands of lives our occupation of Iraq has caused Americans, Iraqis, and coalition forces. Not even to mention the flood of veterans who are coming home only half way, physically and emotionally.
Our President (elect-- although most of his policy suggestions over the last 22 months have been adopted by our current administration) and our country have a lot of work to do. What seems great to me (yes, there is a bright side coming) is that there are more folks than not who seem ready for that work.
I've recently been reading about assaults on Obama supporters by McCain supporters. One woman wrote she was assaulted by her neighbor for asking for her Obama yard sign back (which was displayed upside down in her neighbor's yard). She's got the bruises to prove his reaction. Yes, you read that right: neighbor against neighbor.
Instead of asking the same question I've been asking myself for the last eight years (wtf is wrong with people?), I'm turning over a new leaf in this dawning post Bush 43 Era. What's right with people?
People all want the same things.
We want to feel safe knowing that our government is considering its citizens in its global actions.
We want a government that doesn't lie to us (see WMD argument and the cascade of goose-stepping that resulted) or talk to us like we have the reading skills of a 5th grader. (Apologies to anyone with the literacy skills of a 5th grader reading this, or any actual 5th graders, while I'm at it :)
We want to breathe clean air, to know that the water we drink is safe, the food we eat won't make us sick.
We want to live in a country that we can ALL be proud of.
I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I sick of being afraid. I sick of being scared about what might happen. I'm sick of all of the intolerance the last 22 months has brought out in our country.
It's day four. Wonder what kind of pooch the White House is going to have running around in it? Hopefully it won't be a biter like Barney.
