NOTE:The title and much of the quoted text are from Jackson Browne's brilliant Before the Deluge

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

As we head into the abyss...

For far too long far too many of us have mostly ended up just going along with some of the worst acts against humanity, ever. Either in outright denial of reality or via superhuman feats of rationalization...or by being misled in one way or another, or by simple exhaustion, pummeled as we are by the constant torrent of media-borne propaganda.

In our time we find ourselves mired down in a pig-headed system, divorced from reality and blind to consequences, in which we are played by fake-ass politicians, cheap carney hucksters in Brooks Brothers suits whose souls were sold a long time ago to Wall Street, Corporate America and the Military Industrial Complex.

Fly-by-night politicians shine the public on as they grab all they can for themselves, tomorrow be hanged. Climate change? Pfffft, what's that? The billionaires hate it (because greed makes you stupid), so they'll just keep blathering and stalling. That's what they are paid for.

Look where it's brought us:

A shallow culture, obsessed with trivial matters, and dangerously ignorant of important things. Our culture, broadly speaking, is out of touch with deep wisdom, with little or no meaningful connection to the earth and the cosmos, to other peoples or to our own history. We have the unique and dubious honor of inhabiting the plastic land described by the hippies of the 60s...only worse - a superficial place where nothing matters more than celebrity, sports, entertainment and money. Mostly money. Our politics, rendered down to the pure fat, is no longer about ideology, other than that which has attached itself to the worship of money above all other things. The worship of Mammon, if you like. You know it by its battle cry, 'tax cuts for the rich!'

Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

All this cheap and shallow meaninglessness is infused with a false patriotism and a bullheaded belief in the infallibility and essential goodness, nay, greatness of America. No matter what – against any and all evidence to the contrary. No matter how many bombs we drop, how many immigrants we kick in the teeth, how many children we rip from the arms of their loving parents, no matter how many countries we ruin.

The biting truths of our actual history and present realities are often ignored or glossed over in public schools. Things deemed too controversial are often dodged altogether, never mentioned. My son graduated high school without learning the first thing about the Vietnam war, except from me. The right-wing conservative push against educating the public hath wrought its results. They succeeded, to some substantial degree, in dulling the public mind.

Many Americans are obviously either disinclined or incapable of making an honest and rational assessment of our nation, its history or its present outsized negative impact on world peace, human rights, environmental degradation, global warming, etc. We Americans are too often led by the nose by people who do not have our best interests at heart, nor the world's, and who are manifestly incapable of making wise decisions. Most Americans, like most others, are good people but the ones who have landed in charge are not. Objectively, they are not good for the future of our species.

It's all less surprising that this ugliness has crept into the heart of the nation when you consider that ours is the most highly propagandized society ever, and that we are dominated by ruthless greed-maddened authoritarians. It's undeniably true and it's had a profound effect on our culture. The modern masters have honed the art and science of propaganda to high art indeed. And their tools are more powerful by the day. The ruling elite hire masters of manipulation and pay them king's ransoms for their powers to dupe us.

They do all this while attacking and sabotaging public education in order to better subjugate and impose suffering on the masses to keep 'em in line. It's all about the selfish greed of the stupid rich. Their runaway greed makes them blind and foolish, hardly the ones we need leading us into the future. They've done enough damage already. They stand on the world stage, naked before the world.

We live in a fake Disneyland bubble of their making, purposely constructed to distract and dazzle the rubes, while the slick boys make off with the treasure. It's a land where Kardashians are enormously important, and the plight and struggles of the poor are not. It's a place where it's not worth dwelling on wars and stuff or how we can pitch in and make life better for the homeless, the ill, the imprisoned, the wretched. We are now a place where it makes sense to cut taxes on the richest of the rich while turning away from helping the needy. A land where no one worries about the future. A fairy tale land where it's reasonable to doubt climate science, support unnecessary wars, tolerate police violence and racial discrimination or homophobia and pretend like nothing bad will ever come of such foolishness, such hatefulness.

Television in particular and the media in general have warped reality to suit their singularly self-interested owners. They have done society a grave disservice by misusing their powers to confuse, manipulate and mislead the public mind. And no one has overestimated the power of visual media. Its power is great indeed. If anything, we've underestimated it. That power can be used for good or ill, and it's been, in many cases, not only misused but criminally so.

In many profound ways, and largely because of the willful misuse of the power of television, or by yielding to the usual powers, modern society embodies George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984. Only our high-tech, high-security surveillance state is more powerful, ubiquitous and insidious than even Orwell could imagine. Not that I'd take anything away from him. He channeled the future like he was drinking water. Pure genius.

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 

~ George Orwell, 1984

I want to propose some points for Americans to ponder, forgive me for belaboring the obvious:

Do you think that the military industrial complex (or whatever permutation of that you prefer) is moral, defensible, sustainable or justifiable?

Do you think it's good for the nation?

Do you think it exemplifies our principles as a nation and a people?

Do you think it's worth it?

These are the kinds of things we've been, in effect, duped into saying yes to. Many of us. With, presumably, varying degrees of consciousness or actual agreement involved.

Some better questions might include:

Do you think the Military Industrial Complex thrives on war and is thus a threat to peace?

Can you think of better ways to spend those trillions?

Can you imagine a society with trillions to spend on infrastructure, science, technology, humanity, the arts and making life dramatically better for everyone?

Is the long term well-being of humanity and the planet important?

Have we used the power of television and the media wisely and for the benefit of humanity?

Is it wrong to intentionally mislead the public?

Is it wrong to kill people for profit?

Is it wrong to profit off the sick and suffering?

Is it wrong to profit off of war?

Shouldn't peace and reason be our highest goals?

Isn't posterity a thing?

Aren't we all in this together?

Have our elected 'leaders' served us well?

Can't we do better than this?

Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

If we weren't spending trillions on war, we'd have trillions to make everything better.

Life could be a dream.

Just imagine.

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.” 
~ George Orwell, 1984

Television hypnotized America. The Internet can wake it up.

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge
Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal it's secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Let us all remember that everything is connected.