The New War

By Karla Fetrow

Do we wish for peace or do we dream of war?

The media is humming, the newspapers are blaring, the sound and clash of disagreement spills from city halls, from court yard steps.  In some areas, people are appearing at city hall with guns at their hips, chanting amendment rights… All of this over a health care plan that hasn’t been unwrapped, and whose implications are primarily guess work.  It’s the element of not knowing that has raised dissent.  Without knowing, the public trusted their new president to repeal any further bail-out monies.  The President failed, shattering their faith.  They’ve watched their economy go under and the dollar lose its clout in the global market.  They are trillions of dollars in debt.

The peace keepers ask that we give time for the plans that were set in place to take their effect, but time is what we’ve given over and over again to a government that we have trusted and that betrayed us.  The motivations of those who have recently begun raising their voices have been questioned for underlying prejudices and racism.  A President who gains office with eighty percent popularity and loses it by fifty percent in his first one hundred days of office, has not lost it through a sudden switch to racism.  He’s lost it because he didn’t firmly rein in the run away credit system, a banking policy of spending and borrowing money with assets that were no more than printed pieces of paper.  He lost it because he salvaged the very people who were leading us into ruin, placing the burden of debt responsibility directly on the tax-payers backs instead of those who had created it.

Perhaps it is prejudicial to protest a health plan before even knowing its contents, but the prejudice is based on past performances.  Like the predecessors we’d hoped we had escaped from, all President Obama’s policies for his first seven months of office have had the effect of furthering the benefits for elite society; the burgeoning industry, the giant corporations, while dwindling  the ability of the working person to keep a shelter over the head, of creating dependencies and co-dependencies of government hand-outs in a limbo that is neither socialized or democratic.  It has continued to cater to populist trends that forsake the considerations of individual freedom, that becomes so caught up in the issues of correct behavior and appearances, it forgets the decision making process of personal choices.

It wouldn’t matter really, at this point, if President Obama has crafted the best health care package in the world.  The people of America are tired and disillusioned.  They are filled with the bitterness of promises broken, hopes dashed, their children’s future sold.  They want civil unrest.  They want the rupturing of the boil, the sigh and relief of blood-letting.  They want to tear it all down; the choking bourgeois paper-work, the legal shambles of a win-mentality court, the special interest legislation, the lies and deceit that has turned every good intention into a profit making industry.  Profit for everyone but the people, the Constituents, the tax-payers and their children, their elderly and infirm.

Homeland Security has been prepared for a state of civil unrest.  In a December 15, 2008 report by the U.S. Army Strategic Institute cautions that  a defense community paralyzed by conventional thinking could be unprepared to help the United States cope with a series of unexpected crises that would rival the Al Qaida strikes in 2001, termed a “strategic shock.”

The report, authored by Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, warns that “Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,”   He further stated that, “Deliberate employment of weapons of mass destruction or other catastrophic capabilities, unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters are all paths to disruptive domestic shock.”

Military intelligence understood the possible consequences of pursuing a political policy that would jeopardize the economic and social stability of the American people.  The administration did not try to cater to the public sensibilities, but instead chose to make preparations in the event the policies would not be accepted without civil riots.  Here, too, was an acknowledgment that credibility had been stretched to the limit, and the choice would become a forced peace or the compliance of the loser in an all out war.

We have become a nation without leaders, only businessmen, checking our social security numbers for our possible value; assets; not human beings dreaming our own dreams, aspiring to our own convictions.  We are measured in terms of dollars and cents, we are judged by our degree of equity.  The American people have not chosen this route.  They have been fed it in sound bytes, they have been given a steady diet of it through carefully couched prompts by skilled lobbyists presenting spin doctrines to confuse them.  They wish for leaders.  They desperately desire leaders, but none appear to unify them

Here is the true danger.  Without leadership, we have a mob without direction.  We have a people who feel the injustices committed against them, but have not identified a common enemy nor a common cause.  We have the instruments of anarchy, the trumpeting calls of chaos, but we have no goal.  We have no direction.  The cries for blood are loud.  The festering sores of mismanagement, abandoned strip malls and housing, wasteful production, deteriorating social programs beg to be opened and cleansed.  Who dares, however, to articulate the voice that will begin the progress into change?

We have no leaders.  The political speakers polishing their swords for the toppling of our latest king have no more interest in reinstating the sovereign rights of the American people than the ones they are accusing of poor governorship.  They are out there, triumphantly voicing the effects of unpopular decisions for their own benefit.  The media’s favorite child of today is the scoundrel of tomorrow, a harlequin feeding off public notice.

Barrack Obama was America’s last great hope for peaceful change.  Peace is no longer the desire, only change.  Not change as in a shift of power from one political entity to another, but a change that would bring about equitable stability and sound judgment to the people.  The rumble has started and is gaining momentum.  The blood thirsty lick their lips, the gentle hearted tremble.  A great revolution is springing up out of America; one as unpredictable, as difficult to grasp as the wind.  A future stands before us that could turn neighbor against neighbor, that could snap the very backbone of our government, but we walk inexorably toward it because the boils are festering, the wounds are too deep to heal and because perhaps, from out of the chaos and darkness, we’ll begin to find true leaders.