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2009: The Year of The Big Let-Down!
It has taken me days to figure out the theme, if there was one, of 2009. How can one sum up a year, you might ask, and you'd be correct; it's virtually impossible. But that didn't stop me from trying because to me, 2009 was in many ways like a slow-motion punch in the stomach. And if I feel that way and yet still count myself as one of the luckiest people out of the 6 billion plus souls said to be stomping the yard at any given moment, then I cannot imagine what 2009 was like for most of my fellow human beings, people who are not so lucky. Once again, that doesn't stop me from trying; I'm a writer and a bit of a philosopher, after all.
The disappointment in the air at the end of 2009 was like that escaping a deflating balloon - you could still smell a bit of the good cheer that was in the mouths of the billions of hopeful souls who had over-inflated ideas about what kind of hope and change would be coming to their personal world, a place of fear and scrambling to make a living. Now it seems that reality is dawning and people could not have wished any harder for 2010 and a new decade to start. Why? Because "the oughts," as the British call zeros, have let them down so badly and yet hope does really spring eternal, at least in the countries of the world where freedom still has a chance of succeeding at stopping the forces of ignorance and small-mindedness from imposing their views on everyone.
In my not-so-humble opinion, 2009 was The Year of The Big Let-Down. Think about it. Doesn't it seem that a truly disproportionate amount of people who we thought we could trust, especially people in the public eye at every level, have disappointed in a major way not only we the people as a whole but also the people close to them? I could list them all but it would take too long to do so.
Amy and I did not let each other down, nor did our little Shaman cat Zane fail us in any way; neither did our true friends and wonderful business associates let us down. We did find, unfortunately, that many people we know and were trying to work with let us down. This hasn't stopped us from trying to get things and people back on track.
When people let other people down, they let themselves down most of all. It seems to happen when people stop trying to grow and change for the better. I suppose one really can't expect a leopard to change his or her spots, especially the older leopards. But we have seen of late far too many people we know start "circling the drain" so to speak, on their way to a sad future or an even sadder lack of same. This throwing up of their hands and giving up is their own fault, of course. But I also believe that the air of despair gripping so many people is a reflection of giving up in the face of being let down once too often by spouses, families, friends and business associates, not to mention strangers, especially the strangest of the strange - the people in our government?
Starting from the top, here in the USA, you'd have to be a champion Kool-Aid drinker at the Obama pop stand to not feel let down by our President, a man whose bank-and-lobbyist-friendly actions of the past year clearly speak louder than even his professionally delivered (by his teleprompter) words. Candidate Obama gave the suckers what we wanted to hear about "hope" and "change" and then proceeded to make changes, not in the way that was hoped for, but apparently in the way he knew all along he was actually going to if a miracle happened and he got elected to the most powerful position in the world with no experience in running even a pop stand. There is a recording of Michelle Obama replying to a question on the radio about her husband running for president posed before he took the nomination away from Hillary Clinton with statements like "It's too soon; he hasn't done anything yet."
Do I sound too negative about our luckier than experienced president? Here's a shocker for you: I believe without doubt that even a large majority of those who opposed him fiercely from the gitgo (because of Gitmo? Couldn't resist that one!) secretly hoped that a President Obama would prove them wrong, giving new meaning to the phrase "Hoping against hope." If Obama succeeded against long odds they could then have their sour grapes and eat them, too, basking in the fruitful economic results of his miraculous successes.
Unfortunately, President Obama has not produced any miraculous successes by any standard. He didn't just drop the ball, he has kicked it over the fence and into the river. Why? Many theories. To me, it appears that he has either surrounded himself with the kind of brash, ruthless, winner-take-all political hacks that have made Chicago politics famously dysfunctional and the jails of Illinois well populated with incarcerated politicians or, even worse, he is one of these Chicagoland style politicians. Sad. And if the lessor of two real evils is true and he is merely an intellectual figure(egg)head, then that explains why he can be so easily manipulated by the shrewd, the rich, and the powerful (all too often, the same people). But that is only the very important and most visible tip of the enormous iceberg of let-down.
The Senate and The House of "Representatives" also covered themselves in let-down. They are usually first in the art of letting us down but in 2009 they took it to new heights, "crafting" a health "reform" bill that stands at 2,000 pages for each version, Senate and House, and instead of truly reforming health gives those who contribute to their campaigns and their free rides on corporate jets the equivalent of Christmas every day. And we, the people, are expected to pay and pay and pay and pay through taxes, new and old, obvious and hidden, legal and unconstitutional.
It's outrageous the way our "representatives" are not listening to we, the people, who have bombarded them with emails and letters and phone calls and nearly 10,000,000 pink slips (has the mainstream media even reported ONCE on that huge pink slip movement?) and every other method of trying to get them to listen to us, all to no avail. Yes, our government here in the USA has let us down big time in 2009.
How about you people in other countries who are reading this? Was 2009 a particularly bad year for your government letting you down? People in Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and the other gangster-led governments need not answer because they cannot answer, their governments censor their internet use, neither need answer the people whose countries have been robbed to the point of impoverishment, so many of them in Africa, where internet use is reserved for the rich and the spamming thieves, like Nigeria, and the let-down get's bigger and bigger from there. As you can tell, I do not believe that all cultures are equally valuable. Any culture where the vultures of government and crime or even industry feed cruelly on the living and/or treat women as less equal than men have my undying emnity.
It would be bad enough if things stopped at the government level here in the free USA but the let-down just kept rolling down hill like the proverbial you-know-what that rolls down hill. If what I am saying was not so true, I would not have been able to write what I just wrote above about President Obama and the Congress being such a let down - you would not still be reading my words, dear reader. But in truth he and they have been guilty of so badly letting down so many people that those of opposite political persuasions feel equally let down. They've been equal opportunity disappointments.
And some in Congress have the gall to actually say that if everyone is mad and disappointed in them, then they must be doing their jobs correctly and have satisfied "the center" of the country! This said with more than sixty percent of the electorate, a huge bull's eye of a center, against the health care "reform!" Outrageous liars! But at least they've united us in our disgust for them and their lying ways.
Those on the mythical "left" who want single-payer health care, led by my friend the brilliant Marianne Williamson, and one of my boyhood heroes, Ralph Nader, and film maker Michael Moore, are as angry and feel as let down as those on the mythical "right," led by ??? Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show is worth listening to no matter what anyone says, the purposefully leaderless and politically un-aligned TEA Party movement? Certainly not the Republicans, who have not presented a cohesive argument the way brilliant people like our eye doctor, Dr. Peter Michalos, or our friend Dr. Monica Crowley, Ph.D. or author and Ph.D., Jerome Corsi have done so.
Anyway, it is an accepted fact that way more than half of the nation don't want the "health reform" bill that the Congress and President Obama are stuffing down our throats. The truth is that we are a nation united, united by how let down by our government we are all feeling. Can we build a national consensus and/or a third political party based on how let down we feel? The Let-Down Party. Vote for Monte Farber, candidate for cat catcher on the Let-Down party. Hmmm. I'm not too sure about that name, the party I mean.
Although I am not a member of the Libertarian party, I was actually once asked to be the Libertarian candidate for NY State Assembly here at the eastern end of Long Island. I actually did one of those sitcom looking-at-the-phone looks as if the phone itself was spouting craziness to me. I said to the very nice person who had called, "But I'm a psychic tarot card reading astrologer." "That's OK," he said, "We're Libertarians." It was hard to not like them for that, at least. I attended one meeting but was put off by the parliamentarian stuff "Let's read the minutes of last week," and a lot worse petty stuff.
And I wasn't happy about the Libertarians wanting to sell the national parks. Who do they think is going to buy them, if they're sold in big chunks - the wealthy of the world, of course. And we have enough trouble in this country of "America For Sale." Read Jerome Corsi's excellent book of the same name if you want to understand the problem and the solution.
And yes, there is actually a solution and we can still make America and the world a better place to live but we have to get off our butts, stop the addictions to "bread and circuses," as the Romans placated the people with food for a day and "the games," actually more and more horrendous displays of bloodshed that I supposedly advised on when I was a successful Roman gladiator in a past lifetime (that's for another blog!)
Without bread and circuses, like reality television, the people start thinking and realizing that they're being lied to and stolen from and they get angry and you have riots in the streets, a big no-no as far as governments go. The lessons of the French Revolution and the invention of Dr. Guillotine (yes, it was invented by a doctor as a more humane way of executing people!) have not been lost on the governments that have come after it. They know that once the people are aroused enough to take to the streets in numbers, there is nothing that can stop them. I'm not saying that this is a good idea or is going to happen, but there's only so much that people can take. If American Idol or the Biggest Loser are taken off the air, I'm going to lock my door and pray for the best! ;-)
Actually, we the people of the United States of America may end up being the biggest losers if the money hurricane and tax tsunami emanating from Washington, D.C., trigger big time inflation, rendering our savings useless. President Obama has continued President Bush's full speed ahead bail out of the banks and Wall street (Obama's government is filled with ex-Goldman Sachs executives who will go back to that company or found their own with the money they shower down on their friends) and told over twenty million of my fellow American citizens here on Main Street to forage at the dump of the economy - the unemployment office - for what? What the fat cats with friends on the inside of government throw away and/or throw your way? The "stimulus" plan is stimulating whom, exactly? Four hundred plus congressional districts in this ridiculous piece of pork barrel politics DO NOT EXIST, yet they are getting money. Are you feeling let down yet? I thought so.
And I have felt let down by the news media, which resembles an old boys club that has somehow thought themselves above the law, only to find out that they've had a job to do all along and have not done it. I want to know what to DO about this situation. Does the mainstream media or any media tell us what we can DO about being so let down by the lying liars we've elected to rob us blind and tell us they're not doing it? To paraphrase the old joke about the philandering husband caught in the act, "Who are we going to believe, our Congressmen or our lying eyes?" They are treating us like idiots and hardly even paying lip service to their duty to uphold and defend our Constitution and represent us. I want the news media to help me know what to DO to change the bad news they report, not just hit me over the head with it and depress me. That's just like keeping me down and unable to change anything. I thought Lou Dobbs was going to finally become a rallying point for those of us with an independent nature but he's being more coy than the belle of the ball as to his plans to "go to the ball." And so, what do we do, besides read Mr. Corsi's book and take those actions?
I can't tell anyone to write their congressman. I write my Congressman, Timothy Bishop, all the time and he NEVER does ANYTHING that I ask him to do. He does what Nancy Pelosi and the lobbyists ask him to do. Same thing with our two Senators from New York. Who do they think they're working for? Who do they think they're fooling? Same answer. Us. But they are not fooling us and we feel let down. How about you? Do you feel let down? Or is it just me and you're getting the feeling that those who we should trust to be looking out for our best interests are doing so? If you feel that way, congratulations, and please write to me at info@TheEnchantedWorld.com to tell me how this is happening.
I do believe that 2010 is going to be the year where we all vow that we will not be let down again and take action to make it so. As The Who sings, "We won't be fooled again!" One way to help the process is to not let other people down.
But our government seems to have gone rogue. They don't listen to anyone but the lobbyists and their corporate sponsors and the globalists who want one world government. I do not say this lightly, but only after reading obsessively for the last decade trying to make sense of the nonsense that is being sold to us as our government.
Do I have to run for office where I live to make sure that this happens? My first response is "I sure hope not." But if I don't get involved in some way and lend my best ideas to the process, why should I be surprised that people like my neighbor, Bill McGintee, who as Supervisor of my town has by his arrogance and stupidity and perhaps criminal accounting practices put East Hampton into the red to the tune of 23 million dollars? Where was I? Probably letting someone down and that someone was me. But no more. I am not going to let myself let myself down any more.
I really don't know how to end this essay. I'll have to write another when I get more firmly on the path toward finding a way of getting our government to stop letting us down. I think I'll try some face to face meetings with them, as they offer on their websites. That reminds me of another thing that united we the people in being let down by our fellow people, the Tea Party movement.
Many of the people who consider themselves "liberal," as do I in the most specific sense of the word, say the most horrid things about their fellow citizens who are energized by the Tea Party movement. Liberal means, among other things, generous and it is not generous to put down your fellow citizens who are only trying to do what they think is right. I was right there on the line holding a sign during the Tea Party protests because I think that they are patriotic people who, like me are Taxed Enough Already, the acronym for the TEA in Tea Party. And when the Tea Party people and just plain folks tried to hold their representatives accountable this past August, they were vilified by their fellow citizens, the people who are the most like them, whether or not they want to admit it. And what were they vilified for? Shouting down their representatives when they were lying! Like it or not, that congressman who called President Obama a liar for saying that illegal aliens would not be covered for free health care in this abominable bill was correct and the White House admitted it soon thereafter. The feeling of being let down is actually extending to the pros, to the congress people themselves! Now that is pretty bad.
The oldest trick in the book of warfare is "divide and conquer." As long as the "left" hates the "right" and vice versa the longer there will not be a truly United States of America. Once the people of this great nation/experiment stop focusing on their superficial differences and start focusing on their common goals, they will be unstoppable and finally able to get our government back to being by the people, for the people. This is as close to the start of a "solution" to our feeling let-down and powerless as I can come up with today. I'll keep thinking about it, though, and update this blog in a day or so. The whole thing really gets me. That and the incivility of the public discourse. We've got to be nice to people we disagree with. So the next time you have a knee-jerk reaction about "them,"
remember that line from the old comic strip, Pogo, "We have met the
enemy and they is us."
P.S. Of course, when I say that we have to be nice to those who disagree with us I am not suicidally referring to the Islamist jihadiis or any other evil human beings of any persuasion, religious or otherwise, who are active in their plotting of attempts to kill innocent people and/or destroy the free and hope-filled way of life. They, like the mad dogs that they are, have to be killed, preferably before they can kill. Locking up murderous crazies even for life doesn't work for me. These human devils kill and maim prison guards and other inmates and know perfectly that they won't, themselves, be killed. Face it, there are some people that just deserve the death penalty. From a spiritual standpoint, it burns off a bit of the negative karma their heinous crimes have added to their soul's purpose and then they can come back and begin to work off the rest. I hope that satisfies the sweet hearts among my readers. I am a sensitive new age guy, but I was born in Brooklyn to a NYPD sergeant father and a crazy mother. You have to be strong to survive. Once again, that's another blog.
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