shame on us...

in case you needed any further recognition of the inevitable horrific end that blind American exceptionalism and militarism will lead to...North Korea tested a nuke...and why did they do it...because they were taking notes when Bush and his cronies were obsessed with the non-threat of Iraq and decided not to let the same fate fall upon their leadership. but the jokes on them...because my money says Bush doesn't give a shit if he exposes our troops to nuclear attack, or any of the cities on the western coast...so the nuke in their hands will be a virtual non-deterrent while this bozo remains in office.

the military can no longer afford to trim those unfit for service from its ranks. thanks to the brilliant leadership of this administration they are in a position where known crack addicts are sent back to war because they need the body. they are in a position where the services have to farm the other services to get proper medical and psychiatric personnel. apparently supporting the troops still means sending them in unprepared, undermanned, and without supporting infrastructure...with crack addicts. shame on us.

watched the Baraka Boys last Friday night. i highly recommend it to anyone actually concerned about the future of this country and its children (so if you believe No Child Left Behind was a good idea...this may not be the movie for you...and if you falsely claim you hold christian values yet consistently support legislation that is hell-bent on destroying any attempt to provide basics like education, health care, food and shelter to this nation's poor this probably is not a film you will get anything out of).

the film is about kids from inner-city Baltimore who are given an opportunity to attend a school in Kenya for 2 years in the hopes to get them to graduate high school and maybe even attend college (since 3/4 of their peers will never get a diploma...high school or otherwise...all those children, left behind at schools who will have their funding pulled by these fundamentalists dicks). only after a year they had to shut down the school because it was in the midst of a war zone...and the parents were horrified, acknowledging that the kids were safer in an actual war zone than in the neighborhoods they grew up in...the same neighborhoods you like to pass by and avoid the exits off the interstate...the same neighborhoods you so like to pretend don't exist, pretend like you don't know that there are deplorable conditions in your backyard while you consume away.

one of these kids was 13 and was finally told he was worth a damn. for the first time in his life someone told him he was smart...and with a little encouragement he scored the highest in the state on a standardized math test. thirteen years old before anyone tells you you are smart...for folks like you and i, that is impossible to imagine. but it goes to show you, kids will perform to your expectations...unfortunately for these kids and their peers, we expect them to wind up in jail or dead more often than we expect them to wind up educated. shame on us.

the next day i awoke to see the senate agreed to spend $6 billion on a fence to keep Mexicans out of this country...or at least make them walk a little farther when they are trying to find a better life (maybe we just didn't feel like they were quite earning it without a little longer trek through the desert). $6 billion to keep hard-working folks out of the country...$6 billion to further cripple small farmers...$6 billion to feed xenophobic racism. and we can't find the money to give these kids a decent shot at life. shame on us.

lack of adequate health care, substandard living conditions, subpar education and a complete lack of serious educational opportunities, inability to earn a living...these are moral issues. unfortunately, we are leading the industrialized world in immorality at the moment. shame on us.

while all of this goes on we get on our high horse over military spending in North Korea...hipocritically proclaiming how immoral it is to spend so much on armaments when a substantial portion of the population is not being properly supported. as if we don't have a higher and higher portion of our own citizens living below the poverty line. as if we don't have a frightening number of folks without access to proper medical care of the means to afford even the most basic medical care. as if we are educating our children rather than ignoring them and pretending we aren't failing them. as if we did not kick a few hundred thousand off food stamps while the poverty rate increased. as if we haven't condemned millions of our children to the following options: drugs; gangs; crime; death; and jail. all the while as we spend $400 billion on armaments and the military.

shame on us.