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LETTERS / Americans Should Laugh at Themselves; It’s Healthier

Dear Editor,

“It’s what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional,” BroncoBama said recently when he addressed the nation. BroncoBama told Americans what Hitler told the Germans. It’s dangerous when people to see themselves as exceptional. This exceptional America business has been around for a while. Empire’s see themselves as special as license to do their dirty deeds. Americans should laugh at themselves; it’s healthier. The Creator didn’t make exceptional nations; created us all, in His own image.

BroncoBama, attempting to lift the empire’s reputation, claimed that “our government” is “what makes America different”. BroncoBama is correct that “our government” is what makes America exceptional as we’re the only country that has attacked 8 countries in 12 years, murdering and dispossessing millions of Muslims all on the basis of lies. This isn’t an exceptionalism to be proud of. We don’t welcome the blowback.

Americans are struggling to get through life like everyone. Let’s put an end to all this ‘exceptional’ crap. What would you do if other countries did to us what we do to them?

Many Americans deal with joblessness, or near poverty, for at least part of their lives. According to the Census Bureau, the remaining middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has previously been recorded.

Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The number of full-time workers in America is about 6 million below the record that was set in 2007. Real unemployment is much higher than the fictions fed us on TV. America’s largest employers are Wal-Mart, “our government” and a temp agency.

According to the Social Security admin, 40 percent of all workers in America make less than $20,000 a year. A quarter of Americans have a job that pays $10 an hour or less. Between 1969 and 2009 the median wage Americans earned declined after inflation. America has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001. The average period of unemployment is nearly three times as long as it was in 2000. The percentage of self-employed Americans has declined over the past decade and is now at an all-time low.

Consumer debt has climbed by 1700% since 1971 and half of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month. About 40 percent of working age Americans have medical debt problems, and according to a report in The American Journal of Medicine medical bills are a major cause in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies.

America’s healthcare system is fixed, thanks to Obamacare. I can’t understand the details but nobody does, and that’s the beauty of it; new jobs for the dozen people who know how all this allegedly works. Each year, the average American works 100 days to make enough money to pay local, state and federal taxes.

Today, about one out of every 7 Americans is on food stamps. More than a million school kids in America are homeless but we’re not in another depression, because, if that was so, the TV certainly would have told us, right? If “our government” used honest numbers, they would show that our economy has been contracting since 2005.

American exceptionalism; highest poverty rate and income inequality in the industrialized world, highest child poverty rate, lowest social mobility, highest health care costs, most uninsured/no health care rates, highest infant mortality rate, highest obesity and shortest life-expectancy at birth, highest anti-depressant use, highest carbon emissions, highest military spending, highest murder and incarceration rate. This is in the industrialized world; Google it.

Show us exactly how America has the moral high ground, anywhere. Our foreign policy actors are eternally bleating about credibility and sending messages, as if all the inhabitants of the world are little people who look to America for their cues on how to think and behave. We’re bunch of self-important dullards. We’re experiencing third world levels of inequality and show very little inclination to change it.

The idea that we have the right to attack another country should seem strange to us; we can but they can’t.  Private corporations owned by globalist oligarchs push to keep the military industrial complex profitable at all times. No war means “lost” money.

Exceptional America allows torture, kidnapping, Guantanamo Bay, drone strikes, assassinations, and NSA spying; “Our leaders” entire careers are built on a system of legalized bribery and they’ve exempted themselves from much that they require of us. “Consumers” continue believing that the idiots that created all of these problems are going to somehow get us out of it with the same policies that got us into it.

Exceptional America has denied visas for a delegation to the UN to present their case about the impact caused by Chevron/Texaco’s operations in the Amazon rainforest region of Ecuador which contaminated two million hectares.

America running on the fumes of our glorious exceptionalism/freedom ignores clear hypocrisies which have piled up end to end. Their vacant arguments rely on the errant memories/powers of observation of the American audience, which finally might be turning around a little.

We saw America’s sense of morality at My Lai/Abu Grab. We refuse to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. Our obsession with being exceptional, figuring out just how exceptional we are, and constantly reminding ourselves and world about the certain truth of our wonderfulness isn’t attractive. Like all vanity, it gets in the way of self-knowledge.

A time-honored principle of “our government” is that if you’re paid to solve a problem, the last thing you want is to succeed, because you then stop getting paid.

 

 Craig Dudley