Walking down the street today I felt a
deep sense of sadness and loss. My mind drifted to the past, back
when things were more open, and when people were more able to speak
their minds; the times before 9/11, when the country was free and
everyone wasn’t polarized. Do any of you remember that time? It was
just after President Clinton left the White House and the country had
a surplus for the first time that would have expanded until we were
prosperous, had it not been spent on tax cuts for the top 1% and on
war and security. This time though, it was a war on terror meaning
that it would go on forever.
As long as someone disagreed with us,
the war would go on. If we feared someone was going to do something,
the war would go on. If someone sounded as though they were going to
do something, the war would go on. Soon people started to censor
themselves or be censored while the most conservative voices began to
spew out hatred and ways of thinking all the way back to the time of
the Civil War and before. The world really turned around 9/11.
Millions of people have suffered because some people saw this
incident as an opportunity to push through hidden agendas they had
been working on for decades in order to lessen the power of the
people in this nation, and to take the resources of the average
working families.
My sadness, I guess, was for myself,
but more for the nation. People get angry. They work hard to
justify their anger as they are laid off, or as the price of
everything is going up while the wages are going down. They point at
each other, or blame some ethnic group or the other, or even poor
people sometimes. This is sad and troubling and leads to nothing
except anger and squabbling. So here we are right now trapped in a
world of anger, finger pointing, and squabbling. As most people
would agree who never dreamed of being part of such a world, things
are just getting more ugly with no hope for any type of change or
improvement while a very small part of the population is taking
property, foreclosing on homes, just making all kinds of money by
keeping all of the anger alive.
John Gilmore
www.nextstepcoaching.4t.com .