Independence Day Blues

Yannow, for as long as I remember the Fourth of July has been a joyous occasion for yours truly. Little Jeffro, who didn't know any better, was totally into the fireworks thing. What a great day! All day setting off firecrackers, and then at night, shoot off a few of our own and watch the display the city put on. Great stuff.

Older me learned to appreciate the sacrifices and the highly unlikely events that led to the formation of our country, which in itself is a rather unusual form of government with some clearly out of the box thinking. I was proud of our heritage, how we had tamed a continent on the way to becoming the place the rest of the world wanted to be.

The good ol' U S of A's can do spirit, the unabashed inventiveness and cleverness, the freedoms we enjoyed, the eternal optimism certainly can make someone a tad nationalistic. We literally are number one in about any meaningful way of measurement.

But, we've seen our rights and our principles eroded over time. Our response to terrorism is to distrust everyone except those that are causing our problems, all in the name of political correctness. Our willingness to work out solutions has turned into a "what's in it for me for free" attitude that demands to be fed, housed and entertained at the expense of the rest of us. Our "free" markets have been so corrupted and distorted that only government aid can keep it all afloat, and that bill has yet to be paid.

This has all been true for some time, but in the past a lot of us had the idea that we could vote our way out of this, because by God, we ARE We The People.

But this year in particular we've learned the hard way that we are not in control and never will be. How do you vote out a bunch of career bureaucrats, such as in the IRS?  How do we stop the spying on ourselves when our elected officials act like it's nothing - if you don't have anything to hide, you have no problem.

Bullshit. You ain't supposed to be looking just because you want to. And then we get to the courts - they seem to be legislating out their anal orifices instead of the laws as written and our Constitution. And hey, guess what? We can't get rid of a bunch of 'em, and most of the voters could give a rat's a$$ in the first place.

Now some of my liberal friends are thinking "Wow, what a Republican rube!" because they'll automatically think I'm blaming Obama. Yeah, Dear Leader has definitely taken the reins and spurred that dark horse into a full gallop towards totalitarianism, but the roadwork was laid even before George W. and the Patriot Act, which turned that route into an interstate. This is not something one can lay at the feet on just one party.

This has been coming for a long time, and "this" isn't just one thing - it's a sickly melange of a ton of separate problems interlinked into a stinking Gordian knot of political corruption.

So, sorry if I'm not acting like the spouse of a wife beater, always putting out a happy face for public consumption while she is getting the tar beat out of her. Nope, I'm not much on facades, and this whole mess is just another veneer covering a nasty stench.