Norma Sherry: Mein Country – Unforgivable

If any business was run like the government of the United States it would have been out of business long ago. No business could run as a deficit without its board uprising and firing the lot that ran the business. No business would permit blatant false statements and assurances that all was well without serious repercussions. Furthermore, no customer would continue to buy products or services from a business that had a history of poor quality, or poor workmanship, or awful customer service, or a business that was reportedly running in the red and continued to do so.

So, how is it that we are so complacent? Why are we so willing to allow our elected officials to heap lie upon lie and not be accountable? If it were our children that were so dishonorable there would be hell to pay. At the very least, they’d lose their right to play their favorite game or confine them to their room where they could no longer wreck havoc.

But not so with our government and its elected officials. Nay, we seem to be long on suffering, patient beyond comprehension and errant in our condemnation for righting wrongs. There is no accountability nor are we demanding it. Why is that? Have we become comfortable with the status quo or just ignorant? Have we turned the other cheek so many times it’s become an automatic reflex?

Allow me to pose some questions. What if you were up for a promotion but one of your co-workers was more than just a schmoozer. In fact, this person wanted the promotion so badly that he or she made certain that promises were made to the right people, that monies even exchanged hands. Do you think you’d sit idly by and do nothing? Hell no. Your anger would be unquenchable. You would do whatever you needed to do, or could do, to find justice. More than likely you would report this illegal wrangling to the agencies that oversee employee injustices. Some of you might even bring about a lawsuit. But one thing is for certain: you wouldn’t sit still and allow your future to go down the drain.

Now, what if you were a corporation interested in participating in the rich business of rebuilding a country our country had desolated but you were not allowed to negotiate the possibility? What if the decision of who would reap the financial rewards was decided long before the ruins? Before the attacks even. What if these exceptionally lucrative contracts were assigned to bosom buddies and never even opened for bid? Would you have any recourse? Would you consider this the way business is done? I think not.

What if you were an indigent or disabled or an elderly individual who couldn’t afford to buy your expensive prescription medications, but the pharmaceutical companies offered a program that gave you the ability to get your prescriptions for free? However, even though the pharmaceutical companies were exceedingly rich; rich, in fact, beyond the concept of most folk, they no longer wanted to play the role of humanitarian. So, they put their best minds to work and devised a program that would confuse and befuddle and in the end put gold back into their coffers. They created a plan – and sold it via their savvy lobbyists – to offer a drug program that on the surface would appear to be magnanimous. But, this is where the best part is, they fooled them all. No longer would they be obligated to “give” their expensive drugs, which actually cost them only pennies, to those poor folk. No! Now, they could get their just due. But, where does that leave you? Twenty-eight dollars, or eighty-four dollars, or a hundred and twenty-eight dollars is still way out of your ability to pay. You tell me, who’s the winner here? Surely it’s not the patient on a limited income. So, what’s a little guy to do? Who is going to help him fight city hall? Not his elected official that’s for sure.

What if you were a curious kinda gal or guy? You read every thing you could get your hands on. It isn’t enough that you scanned the worldwide web to read what was being written and talked about all over the world in many different lifestyles and cultures, but your insatiable thirst for learning even brought you to your local library where you would take out book after book, topic upon topic. Well, low and behold, it seems your curiosity caught the attention of those who seem to know what’s bad and what’s good. Next thing you know there’s a knock on your door and there’s men in grey suits coming in your home, your private abode. “Why”, you ask. “Shut up” you’re told. You’re taken away. To where you don’t know, nor do your loved ones, or anyone who knows you for that matter. It takes a while but you find out your considered an endangerment to your country: a subversive, possibly even a terrorist or a person with terrorist connections. It appears you are deemed so because of your reading material on the worldwide web and your town library. What do you do? Who do you tell? How do you free yourself from this unwarranted imprisonment? And where oh where are the principles that our fair land was built upon?

Think these are unlikely scenarios? Think again, my dear friends. Every day in this fair land of ours our rights guaranteed, we thought, forever and ever, we thought, by our founding fathers; guaranteed to us as inalienable rights of our Bill of Rights and our Constitution. But little by little, day by day, our liberties, our precious rights are being dwindled down to a precious few.

The truth is right before our eyes if only we open them to see. The fear of seeing I know is almost too great, but if we don’t before too long there will be nothing of memory to see. As we sit on our comfy couches mesmerized by the latest Survivor or Apprentice or handsome Bachelor, we are being dissolved, extinguished. Our jobs are going to China and India and Pakistan; our freedoms are being abolished; our air polluted; our waters putrefied; our forests fallen; our wildlife exterminated; our culture obliterated.

The fear so palatable that we are on the precipice of losing all that we believed was ours: our dignity, our honor, our precious freedom that I can barely breathe at all. The atrocities are piled high and wide and yet we sit comfy and watch our TV’s. All the while poor innocents die horrible, starving deaths, men and women are tortured in the name of national security while agents of our land are outed for retribution on the highest order. Citizens are wiretapped, personal phone calls are listened in to, private communications are spied upon, here, at home, in the United States of America. How is this possible? How are we allowing this to happen before our very eyes? In America, in the land of the brave, business is business as usual.

The ink is dripping red, the debt growing exponentially and in numbers unfathomable and incalculable, enlisted men and women are dying needlessly, our foundation is methodically being hacked to death and we are doing nothing. We appear to believe the lies were fed. It’s either that or worse: we don’t care. Our children’s destiny is uncertain. So, too, is their freedom, or notion of freedom. Destitution, disease, illiteracy, and incivility are commonplace. Pain and suffering, abuse, and injustice are in every neighborhood, on every block, and yet we do nothing. In America, in the land of the brave, business is business as usual.

We have but to open a newspaper or better yet search the Internet to read Katrina, Abramoff,Plame,Haliburton,NSA wiretaps,Abu Ghraib,Guantanemo Bay,EPA, US Patriot Act,Homeland Security, Dubai, US Ports,eavesdropping, Mission Accomplished,Tom DeLay, Election fraud,Chertoff,Brown,lies,deception,Weapons of Mass Destruction, Iran, Korea,Outsourcing,tax refunds,prescription drug plan, civilian spying,medical malpractice caps, AFTA,FBI, CIA, FCC, FDA,CDC, deception, lies,Sadaam Hussein,Downing Street Memo, Tony Blair, New Orleans, FEMA, levees, contribution reform, AIDS, homeless,healthcare,Osama bin Ladin, FISA,electronic surveillance, stem cell research,Roe vs Wade, corruption,lies, deception,election reform,campaign reform,WMD,abuse of power,Cheney shooting, airport security,Christian coalition,anti-abortion rights, deficit, gasoline prices, terror alert, Enron, Worldcom, conspiracy, indictments, lies,deception, corruption. The words colliding in a maelstrom of horror and a fear I fear.

© Norma Sherry 2006

Norma Sherry is an award-winning writer, co-founder of Together Forever Changing, an organization designed to enlighten and encourage citizens to fight for our liberties. She is also the producer and host of the weekly Norma Sherry Show on WQXT-TV. Norma welcomes your emails: norma@togetherforeverchanging.org

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