Being Young and financially depleted In Bush’s America,
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
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Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
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On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
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