Eric Garner, a harmless man, who was strangled to death by a brutal police officer, has given me a simple answer to a question that other Americans have often asked me over the years, “why do you live abroad?”
At the heart of everything is the ongoing collapse of the middle class in the most highly developed countries. This is something that is destabilizing precisely those countries whose role has always been to stabilize the rest. That is the multiplier of all the other instabilities.
Just to begin by giving a quick answer to the question posed by the title of this post, “Why are so many Americans so crazy?”. The answer is that living in a cloud of misinformation, they are being driven insane.
There is always the temptation to see certain people as reasonable when they aren’t. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isaiah 1:18,” was the favorite bible passage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it describes the basic attitude of all successful negotiators. The lesson learned from the epic battle to pass a more than tame and mediocre health bill or the reaction to legalizing human beings that have risked their lives to come to America, is that it is impossible to negotiate with whipped up insanity.
All of this insanity, from Tea Party to Obama being Antichrist is about using racism to distract people from seeing clearly what is right in front of their faces.
As I was listening to NPR this morning, I heard a voice of reason, a voice of intelligence and decency, booming across the airwaves. This voice wasn’t unfamiliar to me, as I am already a big supporter of the man, but all the same it was an early morning blessing to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders on the air.
At any rate, the focus of Sanders’ rant this morning was the epic failure of the Democratic Party to represent America’s working class, the millions of men and women who struggle each day to keep their heads above water. It’s funny that Sanders would rant on this issue today as, just yesterday, I was raving the same rant about the Democrat’s failures.
As working Americans look to Washington for help and understanding, they see little more than a desert flooded with dried-out creatures seeking dollar bills to horde in their caves. Not only that, they see large, scaly reptiles working to sacrifice smaller ones to their corporate gods and slimy, side-winding belly crawlers dodging beneath the shade of dried brush so as to not agitate their large reptilian opponents.
