The United States of Abuse

[unhappycamper]

The United States of Abuse
Bob Jacobson
Innovation management consultant, public policy activist, and experience designer.
Posted: July 7, 2010 11:04 AM

Like many Huffington Post readers, I've wondered why so many Americans put up with the growing number of wrongs they experience and the declining living standards forced on them.

These fellow citizens are aware that successive Administrations have lied to them -- about the wars, about the economy, even about for whom the tax giveaways were extended and cash bailouts rewarded. They know also in their heart of hearts, whatever they may say to the contrary, that things aren't getting better and may in fact get a whole lot worse, climate change deniers notwithstanding. Yet they stand for patriotism in the form of slogans and empty symbols of rebellion long past. They spit upon their elected leaders. But they elect them just the same.

These malcontents seem to be growing in numbers, even assuming a dominant position in our political discourse. Yet their remedies seem to play into the hands of their oppressors, like "throwing out the bums" and scapegoating immigrants and gays or inventing new classes of villains, like environmental scientists and invisible "socialists." In Tea Party regalia, they defend BP and wasteful overseas spending on wars while ignoring the ecological disaster often occurring on their own front steps and eviscerating our local governments and schools. Their entertainment seems to be playing with guns -- often with fatal consequences -- abusing prescription drugs, and listening to demagogues like Limbaugh, Palin, and Beck who play to the worst devils of our nature.

It made little sense to me. If it makes little sense to you, it may be because your experience as a child, like mine, was been different from most Americans.

For ours is a nation of abused children, now grown up. Conservative statistics state that one of four female children, and one of six male children, will have been sexually or physically abused by the age of 18. Abuse counselors and psychologists in the field will tell you that even higher proportions -- 40 to 45 percent of all female children and at least 25 percent of male children -- are victims of abuse.

[RKP5637]

1. There is some underlying core to the self-inflected abuse by voters whom often

vote in those least interested in the voters. What you've said makes as much sense as anything I've heard. I often ponder how can voters consistently vote in those most disingenuous to the needs of the majority of voters. It's really becoming a national sickness. It's setting a pattern of abuse, of the abused trying to appease and befriend the abuser.