America in the Nude

They told us to wait and see. It didn't take long. The United States of America has been stripped stark naked for all the world to see in just a few days of the Trump presidency. The agenda is clear: we are who we are and we are no longer going to pretend that we are altruistic, freedom loving people. We are who we are, greedy self-serving corporations using our military might to get what we want, not because it's good but because it's good for the bottom line. Steal the oil. Ignore climate change. Defund Planned Parenthood and the National Endowment for the Arts. Coming: dropping out of the Paris Accords, stripping women of the right to choose, privatizing Medicare, stripping insurance from twenty million Americans, and killing Social Security so the old folks like me starve or freeze to death and disappear. Along the way, young people are going to be placed in harm's way. Only the children of the rich will be well educated. The rest of us will be vocationally trained, or pressed into military service to protect corporate interests around the world. The naked truth is this, and clearer every day: America is not a democracy, not even a Republic. America is a Plutocracy – run by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich. The world be damned. The majority of the American people be damned. I can smell the cordite in the air. And all we can do now is bear witness. What the rich seem to forget constantly is that without the rest of us, they have nothing. But if they treat us with respect and provide us with economic stability and security, in the long run they will come out ahead. What I see instead is a domestic free for all pitting us against each other just to survive, and an international bully fest that will turn the world against us. This is not the America I learned about in history books, the America that has set itself up as an example to the world of how to be, the America envisioned by our founding fathers, protected by Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. We have a president who seems determined to force his image of the world on the rest of us, a congress that seems ready to bend over backwards to give him what he wants, and all of it a front for an agenda set to make the rich richer in the short term. The long term be damned as well. Along the way, America is losing whatever is left of what did make her great.