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Why no "bread riots" in America?

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Message Erik O'Dowd

The first amendment to the United States Constitution grants the "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In view of this fundamental right, one wonders why Americans remain silent while their leaders wreck their nation. Our workforce is demolished, ruined by decades of corporate-friendly legislation that has destroyed unions and fostered off-shore profiteering. Our economy is mired in debt, drained by militaristic adventurism and state-sanctioned financial greed. Our fiscal future has been sold to foreign creditors while our assets--homes, savings, pensions--decline in value as money-lenders' bonuses spiral upward, fed by government largess.

 

"The opiate of the masses" may, in Karl Marx's time, have been religion, but in today's America the opiate is a toxic mix of complacency and insecurity. We are lulled into dormancy by a barrage of flaccid entertainment, and we shrink from protest because we fear loss of our jobs and homes. We are ensnared in a web of avoidance and constant striving, too busy keeping our families fed and housed to resist the steady dismantling of a shared and sound America. We don't have the energy or inclination to resist because the corporations that feed our leaders and their enablers, the "mainstream media," keep us distracted and cowed.

 

So why are there no "bread riots"--not even bake sales--in protest of the continued destruction of the American Dream? Because we're too busy, too frightened and too conditioned to care.

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I'm a writer, living in Santa Barbara, CA. Formerly a lawyer, but now recovered. I suppose you'd say I'm a Lefty, but I'm not crazy about labels. I'm grossly disappointed in the state of American politics, American capitalism and consumerism; (more...)
 
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