I believe it is and that we will never become the country so many dreamed was possible.

Many of us really believed that our disgusting history of slavery, Jim Crow, slaughtering, starving and isolating native Americans, letting the poor sleep in ditches and subway gratings, and burning witches at the stake, was behind us.

But those days are far from gone. There was, for a short period of time during the 20th century, people in government who fought for the rights of “common people.” (Some of them were called Democrats and a few were called Republicans.) But those days are gone. Those who hold power are bought, paid for and owned by modern day barbarians that we call corporations. And to corporations, we are all as disposable as toilet paper.

And these corporations are more than willing to let the fringe lunatics among us run amok. It doesn’t cost them anything. Redo grade school text books to dumb down children? No problem. Let credit card interest rates increase by 60%. No problem. Hand over billions in cash to banks and Wall Street? No problem. Let people die because they can’t afford health care? No problem. Pass a “health care” bill that says everyone has to buy insurance? No problem. Let any “health care” bill kick in four years from now? No problem. Leave abortion legal, but don’t let any that can’t afford it have access to it? No problem. Let fringe lunatics rant on radio and TV against anything that benefits human beings? No problem. Help put people to work so they can survive? No way. None of this hurts corporations, or affects them one bit.

Well, do I really need to go on? You all know that this country is badly broken. Hell, we’re even fighting with each other over ways in which we can move around the rubble to make it look a little better. It’s called rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

America survived the Great Depression of the ‘30s because we had leaders who cared. That’s long gone. Today, we have a government of vultures picking over the debris. They know they’re owned by their corporate masters, but they still want more.

Perhaps, 20, or 30, or 40 years from now, we’ll return to some degree of sanity in this country. On the other hand, we may end up looking like Uganda and stoning LGBTs to death. Either way, most of us will have given up caring about it, or be long gone.

If this post seems a bit on the pessimistic side to you, perhaps you would like to shine some optimism on the state of our country.