What do you mean, "It's a free country?"

From Hope is poison of the will in the face of fear

by Herb Ruhs, MD (Unknown News)     

1 May, 2009

Out of a sense of decency for the mental suffering of those who may read my words, I have maintained authorial silence in the face of the now iconic "first hundred days." I am tempted to twist the oft repeated lefty bad joke about the new boss and say, "Meet the first hundred
days, same as the last hundred days." Not exactly the same of course. We can never step in the same polluted stream twice. At least until time travel comes.

But to a first approximation, the first hundred days of Obama are similar enough to the last hundred days of Bush to pass for identical at an appropriate distance. Sure there have been some heart warming reversals of key cruel policies, and for the aid these changes have brought to the needy and suffering we give thanks, but we are still at war using massive weapons against innocent civilians, we are still watching our treasury being actively looted, the military budget is still growing, houses continue to be repossessed by the same banks that are draining the treasury and condemning our children and grandchildren to perennial debt peonage, organized criminal syndicates are still operating with impunity in the US and around the world essentially unmolested, military recruiters are still wooing early teens into the military like so many serial pederasts (my personal favorite example of legalized child abuse), but ...

Oh hell! Anyone with a modicum of intelligence could make a list a mile long of such abuses instituted by government at the behest of wealthy individuals and large corporations who have invested in their political futures by participating in the system of legalized bribery that we euphemistically call "campaign contributions." It is a big picture problem.

Here at the one hundred and first day of the Obama administration I think it is time to begin letting go of the denials that we have perfumed with hope, so we can stand the stench of our rotting minds. Hope is such a funny thing. The kind person never seeks to undermine a person's hope as they confront great challenges to their survival. But it is a mistake to generalize from the individual to the general public. For the general public, the custodian of  consensual reality, hope is often a poison of the collective will, a collective surrender in the face of fear, of the ability to test reality. For a people to undertake the future in a blinded condition is to ensure that disaster will strike.

The US population is locked in this state of agitated immobility. You can practically hear the mental gears grinding and shearing metal as people vainly try to incorporate their current experience with the propagandized myths that they have being fed their entire lives. What do you mean, "It's a free country?"

Our democracy has been leached away by a mass media that has no incentive to deal with substantial issues and controversies and every incentive to provoke the public to a condition of automatic emotional reactivity that is the social equivalent of a lobotomy.

But there is good news on the horizon. At some point, and for many, many people already, the damage caused by a government, a military, a corporate management elite and a mass media, all under the control of organized crime, will force folks to awake from their trance and start to think about how to confront the depth of corruption that we have allowed to develop.

One good sign is that, in some states at least, folks are beginning to dismantle the old political horse-trading system where red meat was regularly thrown to enough extreme interest groups to establish effective rule by coalitions of the insane coddled by a class of corrupt professional politicians. The awakening of the New England region to its humanistic traditions after a century of somnolence, as evidenced by the epidemic of marriage law reform at the moment, is heartening. The success of clean money campaigns in a number of states has brought enough ordinary people into representative government to have succeeded in making state governments the current beach head in the war to protect the civil and human rights that our thoroughly corrupt Federal government has rejected, along with much of the rest of the Constitution, with extreme prejudice.

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