How bad does it have to get?

[FightingIrish]

How bad does it have to get? What level of misery will wake the American people to the reality that we have been duped, hustled and screwed? Will they wake up before there is no possible solution? Things have gotten so bad on so many fronts there should no longer be any debate about the need for immediate and drastic change of leadership.

I’m watching my retirement savings flushed away in large chunks and I can take no solace in the realization that all I’m losing are crumbling American dollars. The price of our failed energy policy is about to deal a death blow to our enfeebled economy, already pillaged by corporate greed. We as a nation owe nine trillion dollars and will be adding a $2.4 trillion war bill to the tab we’ll leave our kids to pick up, at least the ones who survive long enough to get the bill. There is active bloody warfare raging from Northern Africa to the Indian subcontinent and the United States is not only not an agent for peace, we are the illegal combatants in much of the slaughter and financiers for the rest. We have poured the blood of our children on foreign sand and savaged the people they were sent to “liberate”.

Our government is still clawing away rights our fathers died for and blaming it on nineteen suicidal Arabs. We are only now realizing that our presumed right to privacy vanished even before the twin towers crumbled. Our faith in our democratic process has been shaken by stolen elections and electoral victories that seem to have made no difference. We as ordinary citizens have apparently become irrelevant and an inconvenience to the aristocracy .

What is even worse, the nation we were once willing to die for is no longer a shining beacon of freedom to the world. We have become a relic of the noble experiment we grew from and now we embrace the very tyrants we once opposed, the despots that our current leaders have learned to emulate. Our deceitful foreign policy has given democracy a bad name, at least the American brand of democracy, the one defined in that constitution we used to have.

We have passively watched the steady flow of wealth from our middle class to the wealthiest Americans through tax cuts, war spending and corporate larceny. Americans who really care for the less fortunate are losing the means to help them while the government turns its back on those who cannot help themselves. We are entering a new age of feudalism and most do not even seem to realize the steady decline of our once vaunted way of life. Perhaps they no longer care.

How bad will it have to get? Based upon the abject failure of the leaders we have entrusted with our destiny, it may not matter.

[ChicagoRonin]

1. Great Depression

Seriously. Until the vast majority of the citizens (especially the remainder of the middle class) doesn't just feel a SQUEEZE, but actually fine themselves on their assesses with no job, money, assets, house, and more importantly, prospects for a brighter future, that's when it will truly sink in.

Unfortunately, that above scenario is also ripe for disgruntled citizens to turn to easy-looking answers, namely FASCISM. Think of pre-WWII Depression-era Germany.

[harun]

2. The only thing that motivates people is economic hard ship,

the rest (in America) just doesn't motivate people to act.