Frustration, and a Lack of Motivation

I haven’t written much lately. In fact, I haven’t been following much since Super Tuesday. I still do my normal rss read through, and visit the places I always did, but lately, nothing has moved me to write much.

There are a lot of reasons for this. I’ve been chalking it up to my work/travel schedule, but that’s just an easy excuse. I’ve never had much problem taking time to write when something moved me. Lately, as I read, I’ve found all I can do is shake my head and sigh.

The source of my frustration is complex. It doesn’t begin or end with the Democratic Presidential quagmire, though that certainly plays a role. It doesn’t really have much to do with Congress’ lack of backbone, though that is irritating. It doesn’t even have much to do with the direction that our President has taken us, though I have to tell you that I never could have imagined we’d be where we are today 8 years ago.

No, it goes both deeper and longer than any of these things.

In my 36 years on this Earth, I’ve watched lots of things happen, but perhaps the most disturbing, and discouraging has been the summary destruction of our independence as individuals. I’m not talking about government intervention, per se, I’m talking about our day to day lives as people. I’m talking about our willingness to be force fed “reality” instead of making our own. We have slipped into a semi-conscious state, as a people. A doughy mess of indifference and surrender, brought on by paternalistic leaders, both in and outside of government, who consistently dupe us into believing that they, and they only, own the mantle of what is in our collective best interest.

In that time we’ve been fattened up, bred into submission, and surrendered our power for “security” or what ever the buzz word of the day happened to be. We’ve given permission to these select few to tilt the game against us, for “our best interest”. We’ve ceded responsibility for comfort and in the process, ensured that any fight to regain control will both be an uphill battle and have many casualties.

All of this sounds bad enough. Sounds pretty bleak. That’s not the worst of it. We, as the citizens of this nation, have given up our will to fight for ourselves. We have bought, hook line and sinker, the notion that we are powerless, victims of circumstance.

We sustain this with every resigned head shake, every election we ignore, every bogus media report that we don’t call bull on. We are the only ones that have the power to allow this to happen, but instead of stopping the foolishness, we look at each other, dumbstruck, then point in ANY other direction. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

If you feel like I’m blaming the victim, I’m not. We’re not the victims, we’re the perpetrators. The future of our nation, and every future citizen we train to act as irresponsibly as we have is the victim until they join the game.

There are a lot of metaphors that I could employ here that I just don’t care about using. I’m stone cold sober and serious. We are the problem, not the government or the wealthy, we are. The government is an ugly reflection of us. Were it not for our tacit approval, neither group would have been able to do what they have done to stack the deck.

So what’s the solution Captian Negative? The solution is not taking things for granted. The solution is becoming more involved as a group.

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