Me Likes the View from My High Horse

A friend recently forwarded me an e-mail that is supposedly a quote from Jay Leno about a Newsweek poll saying 67% of Americans are unhappy with the direction the country is headed and 69% are unhappy with the performance of the President. Basically the e-mail asked the question, "What are we so unhappy about?" We have electricity, running water, shelter and over 95% have jobs. We can travel freely. We have access to hospitals and technology for entertainment as well as to improve our quality of life. We do not live with a constant barrage of bombs in fear for our lives.

Then Leno (allegedly) goes on to say that Bush guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11 (and then proceeded to alienate almost all other countries by wanting to play by his own rules and manipulate them the way he tries to manipulate the American people...aka if you are not for us, you are against us); and that he cut taxes to get the economy out of recession (hello, when Clinton left we had a surplus); and basically kept all us spoiled, ungrateful brats safe from terrorists (debatable at best). (Obviously parenthetical comments are my responsive tidbits).

I started typing a response to my friend, the sender of this e-mail, but then realized it was getting quite lengthy and the tone was, shall we say, a bit agitated. I knew she did not mean for me to get riled up about her e-mail, so I decided I would not respond to her directly and instead, my verbal vomit will appear here, where people do not need to continue reading this if they choose not to. Yes, I believe in choice!

This e-mail is such a great example of the problem I am having with this seemingly pervasive perspective by Americans. I love this country. I agree that we are spoiled. We (meaning me) are not as thankful as we (I) should be for all the wonderful things that come with being a citizen of the USA and being middle class (and geez, discussing class issues needs its own post). But some people are equating ungratefulness, disloyalty and lack of patriotism with the desire to question our leaders and the subsequent demand for accountability. That to voice dissent is equal to telling our military, "screw you." But isn't that what being American is all about? I contend that it is distinctly un-American (to use this awkward but ubiquitous term, after all have you heard of anyone being un-Irish or un-Pakistani?) to demand quiescent compliance and unquestioned admiration for leadership (political and otherwise) in order to prove you love America and are loyal to her. Criminy*, we'd still be an British colony if that were true.

We (as I am part of that 2/3+ that are unhappy with this President's actions) also know this is the President that assured us there were WMDs in Iraq and later we find out critical information was ignored and disregarded because it did not fit into his pre-existing plan to go after Hussein. He made Hussein the face of the terrorist attack (or at least Cheney did when he did the media circuit) which we now know belonged on Bin Laden and Al-Quida. All but one of the airplane hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi Arabian, but we did not invade Saudi Arabia. The Bush family have a long, lucrative history with the Royal family.

This is the man that authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, condones torture (under the guise of his Attorney General) and wants to take away most of our civil liberties (via the Patriot Act, Guantanimo and the like). I could go on and on regarding the Kyoto Protocol, the premature declaration of us having "won" the war in Iraq, etc. but I'll safe that for a future rant.

We do not live in a world of only black and white. It might make things easier if we did, but oversimplification has its deficiencies (as we have seen in the Bush administration). Yes, black and white exist here, but so do the many shades of gray. Some of us live in the gray. We're still part of the spectrum while acknowledging that black and white live there, too. Cheney lives in the gray...after all according to him, he's not part of the Executive Branch, right? Guess he didn't get the memo.

*I used the exclamation "criminy" because I thought it was a British exclamation (wouldn't that have been so clever given the context?), but I looked it up and it's actually derived from Italian, but I still like it, so I decided to leave it in.