The World's Richest Failed State: Fairness & Freedom in America

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/worlds-richest-failed-state-fairness-and-freedom-contemporary-america-1334583491

Every morning at the start of the school day when I was a boy, we would stand next to our desks facing the flag with our hands over our hearts and say these words:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

Of course, I never questioned whether the republic to which I was pledging allegiance did provide "liberty and justice for all". As an adult with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I can clearly see now that it did not – certainly not then. Not before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, at a time when so-called Jim Crow laws in the South still deprived blacks of the right to vote. When "working women" were teachers, nurses, or secretaries, full stop.Then for one shining moment the ideal of "liberty and justice for all" appeared to take wing. From voting rights to equal employment opportunity, the scent of social progress was in the air. That was from mid-1960s to the late '70s and it was the stepchild of the Vietnam War, which traumatized and galvanized millions of hitherto apathetic Americans. Think of it as a collective case of PTSD, a nation at once dazed, depressed, and outraged by the stupidity of fighting a war we couldn't win in a faraway place against a people who posed no threat to us.

Unfortunately, it was a fleeting moment. The 1970s gave way to the Reagan era and ushered in the "greed is good" ethic that dominates our political culture, drives the supercharged K Street lobby machine, and stalks the halls of Congress.

[marmar]

1. K&R ...... Time for people to wake up and smell the mierda.

nt

[xchrom]

2. indeed. nt

[bemildred]

3. K&R. nt