Ranting at 2 am.

So when will we all wake up and admit that America is pretty much struggling to stay afloat? I read a bit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech before the U.N. and while I think he is an idiot (solely for his denial of the Holocaust) it saddens me that he makes a lot of sense when talking about the state of America. He said "As long as the aggressors, because of their financial, political and propaganda powers, not only escape punishment, but even claim righteousness, and as long as wars are started and nations are enslaved in order to win votes in elections, not only will the problems of the global community remain unsolved, but they will be increasingly exacerbated," and while I do not agree with a lot of his thoughts, some of them, like this one, make sense.
America is no longer this shining beacon of greatness, this ideal nation that the world ought to be worshiping. If we ever were that it ought to be plain by now that we no longer are. Hell, 700 Billion dollars to bail out Wall Street ought to sound odd to us and really, it should piss us off. What has our government been doing? Other than winning elections based on gay marriage, abortion, and stem cells, none of which they have done much about, they have simply put us in a position where we are in a war that is unwinnable, costing billions of dollars, and killing thousands of people. Causing unrest in the Middle East. Ignoring social justice issues like genocide in Darfur. Hell, Bono is doing more good in the world than our government, than our country, and why is it that no one is pissed off about this?
I cannot put all the blame on the government. I am not a fan of Bush, but that hasn't blinded me to the fact that this is all our fault. Yes, you and I, the average American. Consumer extraordinaire. Why does no one care that our country is failing? Because it could be worse. We look out, and we still own cars and plasma screen tvs. Ignore the fact we can hardly afford gas, can't pay our cable and electric bills, and probably can't even afford the houses we live in.
We live in a country that is run by companies and advertising. Please consider that the entire purpose of advertising is to convince you that you need something that, before you had ever seen it, you lived without perfectly. but we are motivated because if our neighbor gets one and we don't have it we will be looked down upon. Yes, we are that foolish and easy to manipulate. All we want is more. We buy our Nike's made by slaves, marked up several hundred percent, endorsed by someone who makes more to play a game than some countries' GDP, and we buy them up and wear them proudly.
We live in a society so numb and paralyzed by fear that we need to be taking pills to make it through the day. If you aren't satisfied you must have a mood disorder. Because of course the American dream is supposed to be some pretty fairy tale where all we do is frolic in meadows and drive our hummers to little league where our sons grow up to make millions and buy us a nice place to retire. And if we stop to look around at what is really going on we see something so different that is scares us, and instead of doing something about it we let ourselves become zombies.
We live in the age where counterculture has stalled. Gone are the days of true protest, of hippies redefining love and creating something new. Gone are the days of punk where people gave a nice F-off to authority. Now we have hipster bull crap that creates nothing new and adds nothing to the world but some misplace sense of mass-produced "individualism" and angst.
We live in an age of calloused indifference which threatens to destroy everything. We live in what is supposed to be the best nation on Earth. Full of freedom and opportunity. But we get caught up in xenophobic hatred, irrational fear, created by those who say they are protecting us. We are lied to, by our government, by the media that, once, was the backbone of democracy. We are lied to by every single product and advertisement that tells us we need it.
The slums of third-world countries are more alive, more thriving, than our supposedly great country. We are afraid of everything. Community dies as we grasp for more and more things to call our own. Life is dying as we go from living to merely existing.
And one election is not going to fix it. Yes I will vote in November, and I even hope that it does some good, but this goes way beyond picking a new man who will be 90% like the old one. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if anything short of massive revolution will solve it.
And to us, oh Christians, how we have dropped the ball. We who spend so much time picketing homosexuals, praising our president who lets hundreds of thousands be massacred in Africa, tell me where our priorities are? Because I can't figure out which passage in the Bible tells us to hate. I find several, however, where Jesus calls out hypocrites, then goes off and eats with the tax collectors and prostitutes and loves them. This callousness from us, who call ourselves Christians, that more than anything is unforgivable.
Sorry for the rant, but I needed to say it.