Field of the American Dream: Again, Paul Krugman writes an insightful NYT article “America’s Unlevel Field” (linked below) and is correct as usual. At the end of the editorial he says: … [Romney and the Republicans] “seem to prefer a society in which your station in life is largely determined by that of your parents — and in which the children of the very rich get to inherit their estates tax-free. Teddy Roosevelt would not have approved.”

It makes a sad me even sadder as I view the US problems as nearly insurmountable and cemented in division. I try to look at the nation’s historical long-view which has often dictated success against the odds. If I were an abolitionist in 1860, which given my values now I surely would have been, I would be despondent that a humanity in our free nation was brought against its will under horrific conditions, stripped of their person hood to labor under the lash and without compensation. Ultimately a war (lost in its beginning) needed to be waged to reverse this evil. I might have given up but justice prevailed.

If I were the Jew that I am in 1941 I would have felt despair that my country, not prepared for war, opened up wars on two fronts first with a militarized honorary Aryan Japan and second with a mighty German war machine dedicated specifically to my elimination. Justice against the odds prevailed yet again.

No matter how dark things look now, no matter the odds of reactionary politics saturated with racist animus I continue to place my faith in the president against Lincolnian odds facing a Republican Congress, dripping with the words of interposition and nullification referenced by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963, this time potentially reversing decades of civil rights progress and compounding the threat of another economic collapse where the 1% wealthiest control it all. Even worse there is the specter of a clear existential nuclear threat if our foolish nation dares attack again a tinder box Middle East.

America , where is your sanity and where is our field of dreams? The American Dream must not become the American nightmare. This nation must come to grips with its ugly truths, its reactionary politics, its economic frauds, its tepid social safety nets or lack of them and this latest nuclear threat, ultimately, to its very life.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/opinion/krugman-americas-unlevel-field.html?_r=1&ref=global-home#commentsContainer