By Chuck Robison
The nattering nabobs of negativity, A.K.A. the US Congress, have successfully crippled our national government, rather than allow the duly elected President to fulfill his responsibilities to lead the country where it clearly wants to go. They proudly proclaim they have been against virtually everything that might improve our country.
Our country does not want a pipeline right down its center to deliver Canadian oil to Houston for shipment to China. Our country does not want to have weapons for everyone without at least a minor background check. Our country does not want us to continue the wrong path we travelled since prohibition in the 1920’s and tried again with the so-called drug war, which we started in the late sixties, and have spent mega millions of dollars with no results, other than populating the nation’s for-profit-prisons with the 2.8 million prisoners, the highest prison population on earth, and most of them for minor drug offenses. And our country does not want another Three Trillion Dollar, lie-driven war in the Middle East!
Another current example of something we do not want is the recent petition by 300,000 citizens of Detroit to the UN for help in fighting their city’s pro-privatization, billionaire-driven, decision to cut off water to tens of thousands of people, simply because they cannot afford to pay their bills.
In response, United Nations experts declared last Wednesday, that the City of Detroit’s shut-off of water to thousands of job-less residents, who are unable to pay their bills, “constitutes a violation of the human right to water” and may be discriminatory against African-Americans.
“The households which suffered unjustified disconnections must be immediately reconnected,” said UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Leilani Farha, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston, and UN Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation Catarina de Albuquerque, in a joint statement issued Wednesday.”
“If these water disconnections disproportionately affect African Americans they may be discriminatory, in violation of treaties the U.S. has ratified,” said Farha.”
This crisis for 300,000 Detroit citizens is a stunning signal of how screwed up we have allowed our country to become. This particular issue portends what could easily happen right here in drought-ridden Texas. Suppose our elected leaders, backed by billionaires’ cash, proposed to privatize Texas water. Would we put up with that denial of our rights, as we have with so many of our other rights?
The mere fact that our citizens are so disillusioned and hurt by the care-less management of serious problems right here in America, completely signals, for me, that we have lost our way. Imagine our citizens feeling the only re-course they have, in life threatening situations, is to call on the UN!
While we have been out invading every third world country we can, America is becoming one itself. This is not a political problem…….this is the very definition of a national spiritual crisis.
What is it going to take to convince us that we must come together and co-operate with each other to improve our lives? Are we going to wait for Ronald Reagan’s prediction that only an alien invasion will make us band together for our own wellbeing and common wealth? Isn’t a total breakdown of our environment, happening right now, enough?
And the next time someone tells you that the environmental problem cannot have been caused by man’s actions, buy them a first class ticket to Oklahoma and encourage them to discuss with the citizens of our neighbor state, how it is that only since the destructive fracking of the Oklahoma landscape, has there been a massive and catastrophic increase in major earthquakes there.
Telling ourselves more lies about what is happening to our country and our world is the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, made new for our times. While you are thinking about that, how long is it going to take us to explore what happened to make our cherished Constitution full of quaint lies and no more than “just a piece of paper”, as one recent US President said?
It seems to me that we MUST move up to another level of consciousness in order to deal with these kinds of problems. As Einstein said: You cannot solve problems on the level at which they were created.
Actually, this is an old problem partially solved by Ben Franklin when he said “……unless we stand together, we shall all hang alone.”
Happy Independence Day!
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