- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
This nation truly deserves its fate.
More and more, it seems to me that America only learns by pain. We've made a fetish out of stupidity and anti-intellectualism. We ignore the facts of the world as if sticking our heads in the sand will somehow make unpleasant reality go away. People knew decades ago that we were headed for an oil crisis - hell, I myself wrote a paper about it in college, based on reports available in the library.
But we just keep shoveling those tax breaks to the oil companies. What the hell is wrong with us?
The Depression taught people something. For one thing, it taught America the value of government regulation of the financial industry. Then we forgot that lesson in the 1980s, and now it's biting us in the throat.
Vietnam taught us the folly of getting into a foreign war without a goal or an exit plan. We forgot that lesson sometime in the 90s, I guess, and now our soldiers are shedding blood to pay for it.
Government spying run amok, corruption, torture...what form will our new lessons take? How high a price will we all have to pay to learn, once again (for how long?) that our rights are precious, and that our place in the universe is NOT assured?
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." - Thomas Jefferson
