Sorry, the world's still crazy ...

For the longest time, during the Bush administration, world events started taking such a bizarre turn I couldn't help but wonder if suddenly the majority of our population just went crazy. I mean, the assault on my country's most cherished rights and values was so blatant and outrageous ... and so many people were walking around blind to the ill logic and injustice of it all ... I felt so isolated.

"What's wrong with you people?!!" I wanted to yell. "This country doesn't torture people! This country doesn't roll over and give away its rights like Habeus Corpus and the 4th Amendment and resign itself to be corralled into Free Speech Zones and go to war over lies and let foreign nations dictate what we do ... etc... etc... etc...!!!" And yet more and more intolerably weird stuff kept flying at us, and more and more I felt closed off into the tiniest minority of people who were not only aware of this, but actually *cared*.

Then, finally, after years of frustration and hardship on my part, the rest of my countrymen seemed to wake up to the fact that the wars were hurting our economy, and maybe wiretaps and torture aren't such a good thing, and yeah this Bush guy is kind of a fuck-up -- it's time for a change.

So we got Obama in there, and for a while it seemed as though America (and the world) had regained a bit of its sanity. Sorry to disappoint you, folks. The world's still crazy.

Even though we know the war in Iraq was based on lies, it's still going on. Kids are still dying. Even though we still haven't caught bin Laden after almost a decade, we're still in Afghanistan, in fact, we've escalated the war. We've even expanded our aggression to Pakistan and Yemen. We've still got untried prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. We've allowed privately owned banks to loot the taxpayers without demanding any oversight. We've allowed BP to poison our Gulf Coast for 46 days and now we're even talking about nuking the damn place (isn't that a bit like saying, "your femoral artery is bleeding uncontrollably, we need to cauterize the wound by blowing off your leg"?!!)

And now it turns out that Israel illegally boarded a humanitarian aid ship, shot a 19-year old American in the head 4 times, and our government rushes to that country's defense???

Not long ago, I had a dream that I was the only one awake in a land filled with sleepwalkers doing incredibly dangerous things ... and getting away with them. I can't help but wonder if that dream isn't more real than what I'm experiencing now.