Last edited Thu Aug 6, 2020, 02:27 PM - Edit history (1)

This is a must read. Here's a little more of it:

Our education system is broken. All this after years of republican rule and a whole shit load of fox propaganda and hate radio.

we are Capitalists. How the two got confused for each other is quite evident in our American history if we bother to look.

To counter the diabolic notions of Predator Grump and his fantasy machine, this makes an interesting point about prognostications of false hope concerning a vaccine. Bromides and blathering solve nothing, they only placate the people who are prone to taking that stuff seriously. Fear and being overwhelmed can make people vulnerable to authority figures, one way or another.

We must check our fear and worry factors and get them in line.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

In the 90s and even early 2000s, Americans celebrated what we thought was America’s never-ending dominance of the world, with a Capitalist economy that was unstoppable. In reality, 2008 was a debilitating heart attack, and 2016 was the last gasp of a failing, late-stage Capitalist country whose economy is maintained by eating its own.

We are an increasingly hollow carcass that was eaten from the inside. Light is starting to poke through, and the myth of American Exceptionalism and unity is dead.

Was just discussing this yesterday. For those of us who were alive then, Reagan's election was every bit infuriating to us then as the 2016 election was. How could America elect this guy?! Many of us saw how American's became enamored to image, not substance.
We ignore the fact the the President is hired by us to manage our national affairs. Neither Reagan nor this current idiot have any clue how to manage anything, other than their own self-promotion.

all things in America.
Put him in every town square, and in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington.

... I really have no problems with the US being taken down a notch or two. This "USA! USA! USA!" stuff and "American exceptionalism" nonsense has always irked me. Almost as much as Lee Greenwood does.

To me, the article is as if we will never be better....I disagree

I'm too old to change, too experienced not to agree with you. But the "spiritus mundi" is determined despair, surrender to dystopia, for some the satisfaction of believing we're already "proven" a failed state. Get with it or be "square."

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

"The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness."

The author nails it.

We do know that power was extremely, unfortunately unbalanced, with much of the world far too dependent on us for their security. The American Century.

This does seem a very bad time for us to lose much of our power to lead, of course. We're definitely having an adjustment, but we have more than enough overweening preeminence to give some up and remain the world's single wealthiest and technologically advanced nation. If we throw off this grave danger of a RW authoritarian takeover, restore sane government, and recommit to our alliances, putting Russia back in its box in the process, and the enormous problems of climate change in other nations don't destroy us with them, it would be hard to keep it from happening.

Yes, China's coming up, but we've deliberately helped that because most of it was good for us, including helping the planet avoid the enormous threat of China's explosive "carbon footprint" growth. In any case, China has a bunch of enormous problems of its own. And so do many other areas of the planet. Trying to keep the rest of the planet from blowing up would be our biggest problem in our new American century. Many among the billions in hotter climate areas, including in China, are already being forced to permanent abandon their homelands and migrate to wherever they can, and that's barely begun.

Last edited Fri Aug 7, 2020, 02:04 PM - Edit history (1)

This is tremendous essay and should be read by all Americans.
We let this happen. We're the ones responsible for allowing this to continue, up to the point of giving the GOP the Senate, House, and White House.
And yes, it is the GOP at fault here. They're the ones who overstocked the military at the expense of the social life net. They're the ones who encouraged the NRA to over supply the country with firearms. They're the ones who led the destruction of the labor unions. They're the ones who cloaked their evil deeds in the flag. But we're all the ones who let it happen.
The comments after the article on the Rolling Stone site were all we need to see that this cancer is fatal. The usual bunch from the Freedumb crowd are firing away as if they either didn't read the piece or are incapable of understanding it.
This will not get better. Yes, we will hopefully elect Joe Biden to the White House and the latest clean-up on Aisle 244. This will go on for awhile, maybe even two terms, and then another moron wrapped in the flag will ascend, or descend an escalator somewhere - a "populist" running on the deficit that the GOP has traditionally ballooned as they eagerly destroy every bit of the America that once stood as an example of functional democracy, but in reality never was.
We haven't fought a war to protect our freedom in over 75 years. In that time, trillions and trillions of our wealth has been spent to "maintain" a bloated, useless, and obsolete military establishment. We have no universal health care, our public schools have been eroded to the point where the underpaid teachers have to supply the tools they need to teach - like in a third-world country, and our once envied infrastructure is collapsing from years of neglect and mismanagement. As the article notes, a few uber wealthy individuals now hoard most the wealth. The rest of us contribute to charities and crowd sourcing sites to try to and help those who we know about that have fallen through the torn social fabric of our country.
There's no fixing this. We'll live through it, die, and hopefully won't see the day that all of us who know about what the country could have been have been dreading. But come it will.