pan6467

The greatest things about America were the diversity, the education and the entreprenurial drives. Community pride and civic responsibility was also very important and drove us.

I talk in past tense because the diversity, has come to divide us in many ways: political correctness, having to rewrite history every time some group doesn't like what has been said, the division that exists between races, classes, political philosophies and even religions.

Diversity once made us very strong and respectful of one another. Now it seperates, divides and does more harm. We're not Irish American, African American, whatever American..... if we were born here we're simply American, putting something else in front is like a someone pissing in the eye of the country. It's become very destructive.

Education, we took great pride in being well educated and worked hard to make sure everyone got the best possible. It worked. Helped people to want to better themselves. Helped us develop the greatest technologies of the 20th Century.

Problem is when the Boomers reached the 80's and the Yuppies started achieving something, they forgot how much the country gave them and believed greed was good. Instead of making sure what they were given was better for their kids than what they had, they didn't care. They cared about materialism..... so for the first time ever in our country we started to move backward in everything and we still are.

Entreprenurially, we supported mom and pop shops. The country had loans available, the government knew this was the bread and butter of America. What happened was suburbs, malls, people hunting for cheaper products so they went to buying imported goods. Greed took us away from community owned and based shops because we could get more for less. And now we have to shop at the conglomerates because all the mom and pops are going fast. Either they try to keep prices low enough to stay open and go bankrupt or they have to charge more than the big national chains do and people can't afford them....... so they go out of business.

Noone at first thought those Japanese transistor radios would destroy the economy. We had educated ourselves and we had moved forward in technology. We manufactured higher ticket items like cars, appliances, and so on and the companies had great R&D departments to keep us moving forward.

But again greed of the unions, then management made R&D to expensive, plus our education is behind in the world now. Other countries stepped in and took over, first the televisions, then cars, then appliances and steel, and computers, until there isn't much left.

Our communities and the ways we would help each other..... have turned into having more than the Smiths, he who dies with the most wins (wins what I'd like to know), petty jealousies, and again greed..... why should we pay taxes let everything go to Hell, the roads, the inner cities, the police, the fire departments..... it's our money we need it to buy more stuff and to get more money. Fuck the community.... I don't need them, don't care about them and what have they ever done for me?

And the companies...... are so profit driven they have to leave to find the lowest possible overhead. Which again forces communities to lose atx revenue and suffer. So they cut everything they can and people start bitching about the roads, the nasty water, the way the towns are decaying, the crime..... and it's a spiral downward where again, we'll leave our children worse than what we had.... and that is not what America stood for until the greed and the idea of unregulated unrestricted capitalism.

Even the areas that we were once the greatest in such as space programs and oceanography, climatology, physics, ...... any of the sciences we have fallen behind in.

But we still have every 2 and 4 years a chance to change policies and better ourselves. And I am eternally optmistic that the country will correct itself before the neocons destroy us with their economic, police state and military policies.

But as you see in this thread and even in my own post, the division in this country is our greatest enemy, not terrorism, not some outside force or country, but our own inner turmoils and prejudices and mistrusts of each other.

Is America still great? We can be. The people individually still are, we just have lost the ability to communicate with our neighbors, our community responsibilities and our national pride to keep bettering ourselves.

We're like a beaten animal that is cowering in the corner right now licking our wounds. We're ready to blame and attack anyone who comes near whether their purpose is to help or to kick us while we're down..... and yet the truth be known, we did all the harm to ourselves because of the very things, diversity, education, and entreprenurialism that made us strong. We got greedy and forgot what made us strong and in doing so we became weak.

But the optmistic side of being a beaten animal is that we can heal, become stronger and get our spot back in nature. Or we can lay down and let our wounds kill us..... right now we're letting our wounds kill us because we refuse to find common ground and work together.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"