Do You Love America? Do You?

blerg

.. then why don't you leave?

This was the question put to me by a peace-love-respect raver chick and friend of 5 years. An unlikely victim of the super-patriot virus, making it all the more shocking.

But no question should be feared; only hasty answers.

So if I hate America so much - as apparently I must, because I dared ask the question "Has America done anything to deserve this?" on the morning of 9/11 - why haven't I left?

The answer is that the question is based upon a faulty conclusion. I do not hate "America" - presumably defined as the bulk of existance within these national borders. I do hate the corruption and denial of responsibility that has spread throughout all 3 branches of the American tree, from the double-dealing Congresscritters in the Legislative, to the Dept of (In)Justice and its blue-shirted standing army in the Executive, to the pencil-pushing, crank-turning, record-keeping, head-nodding appologist drones of the Judicial.

Likewise, I hate the bulk of the American public. Only when they wallow in their WWF- and CNN-fed apathy are we spared the persecutions of their intolerant, xenophobic, Christian crusder ways.

But do I hate all of America? The rich American marketplace, full of goods and entertainments and luxuries that far surpass the primitive bazaars of other countries? The job market, full of employment opportunities that still exceed the pay and challenge of digging a ditch or pulling a vegetable cart in some desolate 3rd world pot hole? The diverse American geography, with its beaches, forests, deserts, canyons, southern deltas, and northern slopes?
The American culture of high-budget Hollywood special FX, muscle cars, and rock-n-roll?

I don't hate America. I just hate most of the shitheads who inhabit it, because they don't understand the self-evident moral obligation to live and let live. Don't smoke this, don't drive that fast, don't express that idea, don't do that with that girl for money, don't build that on your property even though you own it, give us money, give us money, give us money or we'll arrest you, etc, etc, ad nagium.

I don't hate America. I just hate you. This is my home, and I'm staying.

*Sj

Anyone living in America as a American citizen is free to leave this country. Thats why people say if you dont like it you can leave it. Not everywhere can that be done so easily as here. Like if you dont like the heat get out of the kitchen, same thing. Living room is right there. go to the living room.
Notice how the people who are most angry with living here get the angriest when reminded theres nothing forcing them to live here.
I love this place. I was fortunate enough to be born here. And it agrees with me. Sure theres shit I dont like here. Welcome to Humanity as it exists on earth.
Kids gotta grow a brain at some point and recognize where they are. Fictionalized reality to suit psychosis is the platform from which no suitable construct of policy can arise.
America is the EVOLVING model for what will be the healthy future of all mankind. Not because you hate it, because some of us recognize whats going on, where we are.
She'll figure it out. Nothing is permanent. Nothing.

america agrees with you because it's as stupid, callous, and flatulant as yourself.

or, perhaps, it's because you have a social vision befitting a complacent, do-nothing, go-nowhere boob.

think back at the moments in history when humans arose to make life better. your kind always sat on the sidelines eating junk food.

by the way, d-boy, when ya goin' to Afghanistan? You're still going, correct?

aaron shows yet again the pathetic leftist vanguardist belief that all social progress is b/c of them and that everyone not on the bandwagn is obviously worthless.

why don't you think about the great developments of this century. massive increases in living standards, health care, nutrition, etc. all accomplished by those "sitting on the sidelines" doing "worthless" things like researching, investing, and working.

get real.
sitting on your ass prosteltyzing on this and that does little to make the world a better place compared to some university researcher or a lab technician.

i'm altogether opposed to vanguardism, and do not envisage social change as occuring because me and my coterie huff and puff hard enough.

unlike you jon i see society as a social totality. you may denegrate the sanitation worker because s/he commands less than the investor in the marketplace, but i see him/her -- unlike the parasitic investor you venerate -- as absolutely necessary to making society run. much lab research has indeed made life better, but the researcher, too, exists within a larger social context (and i'll tell you that I know doctors and lab researchers who have in the past and will in the future take to the barricades). the same goes for the bike messenger, the nurse, the disabled attendant, the food server, the migrant farm laborer, the janitor, the childcare worker, the data enterer, the maid, the gardener, the waiter, the UPS driver, the BART operator, the longshoreman, the market checker, the retail plebe etc etc. in the society I hope to see brought forth some of these jobs would be radically reconstituted or abolished, but I understand in THIS society those who fulfill these functions possess power: the power to bring this asinine set-up to a halt.

And also unlike you jon i don't engage in the fallacy of commodity fetishism, of seeing capital -- or as you more inocuously put it, the "investor" -- as the moving force that builds skyscrapers, tends to the sick, grows food, delivers parcels, washes dishes, stocks supermarkets, and paves roads. there's a dialectical relationship between the wage worker and the capitalist, yes. however, there is one catch: the wage-worker doesn't need the capitalist. but the capitalist couldn't exist without wage-labor. take a look at Catalunya, Spain in 36 or France in 68 and tell me of capital's mystical powers.

as to Danny Thomas: during the civil rights movement, honestly, weren't his kind sitting on the sidelines, or worse?

i raise the civil rights movement because nobody who wants to be taken seriously today declaims against it. but, really, who are the people who were opposed to the civil rights movement when it was actually unfolding? how many of them do you admire? wipe that smug little expression off your face and give it some thought.