I have thinking about all of these questions, and everyday I find myself so preoccupied with the questions; I find little time to research the answers. It would be so easy to blame everything on the vacant mind that occupies the oval office. While Bush and his cronies have much to do with the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in, he isn’t responsible for everything. There is nobody that is responsible for everything. Replacing George W. Bush with a new face, no matter whose face it is, won’t solve all of our problems. The truth as I see it, no matter who becomes President, providing that he doesn’t follow in the steps of the Pakistani President and cancels the elections by declaring martial law, is that the entire system is corrupt, from top to bottom.

The Republicans can blame it on the Democrats and vice-versa… and they do. The truth is that every nasty thing they say about each other is part of the show. The political infighting and bickering is all part of the arrangement designed for public consumption. In reality, most of the people holding elective positions in this 21st century America, except for a few principled people that haven’t gotten themselves neck deep in filth by returning political favors and keeping secrets, have many reasons for holding office; least of which is representing their constituents. That seems to be the only part of our Republic that remains truly transparent and can be readily understood by anyone that takes the time to think independently from the media. I bring the media into this for a very good reason. It seems as if a substantial portion of Americans have decided that they are much too busy to think for themselves on issues that are not personally important to them.

This, in and of itself, is one reason why we find ourselves in this situation. The American people seem to have put way to much trust in a media that is deathly afraid to speak out on anything that might be controversial, lest they offend anyone. A case in point was during the selection of the new Pope after Pope Paul died. I was in a hospital room after an operation and my wife and I were watching TV. I forget how many days they had been deliberating but the point was that if they selected a new Pope, the smoke coming from the Vatican was supposed to be white or black or if the College of Cardinals could not reach a consensus. I saw the smoke and I said to my wife that it was white, she agreed. The newsperson on TV couldn’t make that assumption, even though the smoke was obviously white. I flipped through the remote and it seemed as if every newsperson on television that day couldn’t tell black from white. It took almost fifteen minutes until one daring reporter ventured an opinion that the smoke was white. Once that was said, I flipped through the channels and at that particular point in time, the networks finally decided that they could tell black from white. I couldn’t make something like that up. This illustrates my point exactly. News isn’t based on fact anymore, it’s based on consensus. The media isn’t completely censored by its corporate sponsors or the government; it is also under a form of self-censorship.

The American people not only don’t demand coverage of political wrongdoing and corporate crime, they seem to fear and despise coverage of it. There are many Americans that would rather see coverage of celebrities and sports than deal with the war in Iraq and corporate scandal. The reason for this I believe is that they can talk around the water cooler at work about sports and celebrities. Talking about the war is a delicate subject with no clear solution, and thus makes it hard to discuss. The idea of bringing up the subject of a corporate controlled America in which our entire political system and the media are taken out of the control of the population and placed in the hands of corporations is another conversation killer. We were raised to believe that capitalism is the life-blood of this country. To suggest that this very same capitalism is killing our right to be informed citizen’s with the right to choose our own leaders sounds too much like a Marxist diatribe, even if it is the truth.

We seem to have fallen into a mind-set that there is nothing that we can accomplish even if we all agreed that this situation is bringing us to an Orwellian type of society where our rights and responsibilities are taken by a kind of corporate oligarchy. Our news will be filtered so that we become docile and undisturbed. Our leaders will be financed by those that see it in their best interests to spend heavily on those that will not impede the agenda of business. No longer will we see bright upstarts on the political scene. The only ones that will be nominated to run for office from the two corporate and special interest controlled political parties are the ones that can prove that they can be trusted to do the right thing by the people that finance their campaigns. This is already happening in this country. If things continue to go as planned, this nation will have had a President with the name of Bush or Clinton since 1989 and could well continue until 2016. Is this just a coincidence in a nation of 330,000,000 people?

We were led into a war with Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We found no such weapons so the rationale behind the war became “To bring Democracy to Iraq”. The media reported this without blinking its eyes. We are now told that Iran is a “State Sponsor of Terrorism”. The media is reporting this also with a straight face while we continue to give billions in military aid to a nation that has declared martial law on its citizens after they built nuclear weapons and put these weapons on-line without so much as a whimper from the American government. While we continue to ratchet up the rhetoric about Iran being a supplier of weapons to anti-American forces, we continue to be the world’s largest arms dealer. We continue to speculate on a decision to attack Iran even though Iraq’s WMD’s never existed. Since they weren’t to be found in Iraq, we brought along our own in the form of depleted uranium. Now along with the “democracy” we brought to Iraq, they can also deal with the radiation poisoning of their people. The media hasn’t yet informed America that this radiation also gets into the atmosphere by pulverized DU shells and missiles. Radiation has been found as far away as Great Britain with a radiation count over 5 times the normal amount.

While we export radiation sickness to the Iraqi people, we make sure that the media doesn’t report on this less the American people get too “disturbed” over it so that the defense contractors can continue to reap record profits. The oil companies that claim on their TV ads that they are bringing you a cleaner, less toxic biosphere push the Iraqi Parliament to pass the “Revenue Sharing Law” that would give 25% of Iraq’s only real natural resource to the people of that shattered nation while the multi-national oil companies get the other 75%. The media didn’t report on that either, and if it did, I never saw it.

So after all of this you may be asking yourself why I wrote this. The only thing I can say is that maybe I was just trying to put this into perspective. I have been writing about these things for a long time now and it still seems as if everything that I write, along with others that write about these things, falls on deaf ears. Sometimes I wonder why I continue. I guess that I believe that one day the American people will see exactly what kind of game that our government, the media and the military-industrial complex is playing. Maybe someday I’ll hit on just the right combination of words that will allow other Americans to see exactly what is on the line. What is at stake here is our form of government, our freedom, our economy and our very existence. You may believe that these “powers that be” know exactly what they are doing and have this all under control, but you would be mistaken. The only thing that they understand, the only thing that they have forecasted is their profit margins. They have no idea about how things will turn out. They are as clueless as the rest of us.

While this country wakes up from its deep slumber, there are people out here that have been awake for quite awhile. Last month there were mass demonstrations in eleven different cities across the United States, unless you were there, or talked to someone that was, you wouldn’t know it. There was no coverage of these demonstrations by the traditional media. It wasn’t that it escaped their attention; they just refused to cover them. I guess the best place to get information about them is the FBI. Maybe this is why they gave KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, millions of dollars to build “detention centers” in the United States. Sooner or later we may get a chance to see these “up close and personal”.

The only way that we are going to change things, the only way that we are going to stop this  war, and to defeat those that would take from us our liberty and our right of free expression, is to do what others have done when faced with similar circumstances. The only way to get coverage of demonstrations against the war and the ones to come is to use civil disobedience. The only way we will get most young people involved is to make sure that if and when we are at war with Iran is to let them know that there will be a draft. The only way that people that finance these politicians that refuse to do the will of the people is to boycott their corporations and interfere with their operations by demonstrating in their factories and shipping points. The only way that we are going to change anything is to get angry enough to protest, really protest.

What will it take for Americans to leave their comfortable homes and get involved? A million people dead? That’s already happened. Concrete proof that our President has lied to us, that’s already happened. What about the government spying on Americans without a warrant? What about the media refusing to report on news that may be controversial? How about Congress refusing to do the will of over 70% of the people that are against this war in Iraq by stopping the funding? Tell me, when do we start acting like Americans and stop acting like a people that are afraid? Will we wait until it is too late? We may be there already.

That’s the way I see it.