I think back to how my grandparents
viewed the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, the Civil Rights movement, hippies, and the
violence at the ’68 Democratic convention and I’m pretty sure they thought our
country was going to hell in the proverbial hand basket. Little did they know that time would one day be referred to as "the good old days."
My grandparents’ generation was a tough
bunch. They’d seen a real depression,
where all the money was actually gone and not just siphoned upward by a small
number of the powerful and greedy.
They’d been through two World Wars and Korea and couldn’t understand what
this fuss was all about over
some unheard of place called Vietnam. In their day, America was always the good guy. I
envy them that unwavering belief. I envy them the
security they must felt after Roosevelt passed the New Deal knowing that they and
their loved ones could always count on some financial protection in their old
age. I envy them their belief that
America would always lead the world in a free, high-quality public education
and that no matter your circumstances of birth, there would always be
opportunity for you to fulfill your God-given potential. Most of all, I envy that they could agree or
disagree with the workings of government, but at least their government
seemed to work.
In those days, the “Katzenjammer Kids” were a
comic strip. Today they populate the
halls of Congress, seeming to live to create discourse in a non-stop theater of
the absurd. It’s not just one side of the aisle
either. Okay, maybe it’s mostly one side of the aisle – you know
who you are – but Harry Reid had the opportunity to restore credibility and
function to the senate with filibuster reform and he completely weenied
out. There has always been in-fighting in Congress
where both sides fought hard for their positions, but most of the time they
actually had positions, as opposed to this current lot whose only goal
appears to be the gathering of personal power and the rest of us be
damned.
How did we get so stupid as to elect such a
bunch? They regulate vaginas, but not
guns. They give away millions of our tax dollars to oil companies who then turn
around and steal even more from our pockets at the gas tank. They secretly tap our e-mails and phone
calls, while demanding “full transparency” about lack of security at our Libyan
embassy after cutting funds for the State Department. And
on and on and on…
Now they’ve manufactured a crisis in government funding,
which could throw our fragile economic recovery into complete ruin, and are
treating it as no more than a pissing contest with the majority of piss about
to rain down on you and me.
This coming week Congress will return to session
and all I find myself thinking is, where’s a drone when you really need one?
This post
from the 30 Days Minus 2 Writing prompt “absurd,” but I’ve felt it coming for a
long time.
