Op-Ed by Janet Phelan

It’s almost all anyone can talk about these days. “Who you voting for?” Then, “Are you kidding me? Don’t you know that (fill in the blank) is a total (fill in the blank)????”

While passions are running high, a bit of temperate objectivity might put some things in perspective. The fact is that we have a psychopathic liar running against a narcissistic moron. Does that clarify things at all?

The questions we should be asking this election cycle are not, “Who you voting for?” but rather, “How did things get to this point?” A country of 300 plus million, which boasts that “Anyone can be President!” might have produced a viable candidate for the top office.

Instead, we are faced with a choice between an unrepentant liar and someone whose policies are uninformed — at the very best — and dangerous at the worst. The choice is between a political insider who has broken innumerable laws and in so doing placed the security of the nation at risk and yet continues to lie about her actions — on the one hand — and on the other, a racist and misogynist whose overblown sense of his own abilities might qualify him for time-out in a rubber room.

On a deeper level, the passions running on both sides of the political fence indicate an undercurrent of profound anxiety — which is altogether appropriate, given the stakes in this election. The 2016 Presidential election is not taking place during a time of peace and prosperity. The aggressions unleashed after the events of September 11 have brought us a state of global and continual war.

Depending on your definition of war, writes Tim McGrath in a 2014 article in The Mint Press, one might conclude that the US was currently involved in 134 wars.

Due to the inadequacy of counting protocols, it is difficult to determine the death toll due to these wars. In April of 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility issued a report stating a death count of somewhere between 1.3 million and two million victims in the first ten years of the war on terror.

Democracy has also been a victim of the war on terror. As a result of the manipulation of the perception of terrorist threat, the US has virtually abandoned any pretense of having a viable democracy. Gone are the rights which protected us from overreach on the part of our government and gone are the rights to petition for redress in the event of such trespass. Yet another casualty in the war on terror, as its plays out domestically, is the knowledge that law enforcement officers will protect us and not attack us.

If a Pandora’s Box were opened on the morning of September 11, surely what was set loose is war and rampant insecurity.

The economic fragility that has ensued can be seen by anyone walking through downtown Main Street. Homeless line the curbs, banks continue to foreclose on homes, businesses have closed and the only ones being offered safe harbor are the banks which enabled this blight.

In a recent article in New Eastern Outlook, correspondent Phil Butler announced that this election “May be the beginning of the end.” I should like to propose that the end is already well at play, and, as T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Not with a bang but with a whimper.” While we may not consciously know how close we are to the brink, our innate sense of things is screaming at us to pay attention.

So when violence breaks out at Trump or Clinton events, it is being spurred by the perception that we are at the tipping point. And as we are given only two choices (sorry, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, but you really are sidelined at this event) and as the unavoidable underlying perception is that this election is taking place at the brink of the abyss, it is hardly surprising that physical conflicts result. The passions on the right or left may be motivated by the same core perception but are evidencing themselves in strong displays of partisanship.

Objectively speaking, both candidates are utterly trashy. So rather than pick apart the refuse of the American dream, let’s take a good hard look at what we intuitively already know.

America is being destroyed, and destroyed from within. As the quote unquote leader of the free world, America would be at the top of the list for destruction — for anyone seeking total world control. The strongest and most vibrant democracies would have to be taken down in order to clamp the vise tight on the globe. And as America savages its constitutional protections, one can’t help but noting that the other quote unquote Western democracies are following suit.

It is no secret that the passage into law of the USA PATRIOT Act, following the attacks of 911, shredded the US bill of rights. Similar laws were subsequently passed in other quote unquote vibrant Western democracies, including Canada, Great Britain, France and Germany, to name some of the major contenders. If we didn’t quite “get it” before, Ed Snowden’s revelations should have gotten us up to speed. The global surveillance state is now up and running.

The initiation of a surveillance state is only preparatory to the next step, which would involve the elimination of “unsavory” elements. Given the fundamental history of this sort of thing manifesting in the quote unquote Western democracies, one could foresee that this might involve the elimination of undesirable racial groups as well as of political enemies. And for those who find this bald statement to be over the top, it doesn’t take too much research to see that This Is Already Happening. This recent article in the venerable Time Magazine only reveals the tip of a relentless and morally unacceptable impetus.

Neither a Trump nor a Clinton presidency presents an alternative to this dystopian scenario. Whether Mr. Trump has been read-in to the plans or not is almost irrelevant. His inherent racist beliefs as well as his on-the-record statements about suppressing political dissent make him a ripe candidate for presiding over the endgame. And as the obvious favorite of the powers-that-be, Hillary Clinton would be unlikely to deviate from the plan.

So while you are bashing away at your neighbors or your online contacts about their positions on this upcoming election, consider this. What is at stake is not four red or blue years. What is at stake now is whether or not there will be a future worth inhabiting. And that is not going to be decided at the ballot box.

Janet Phelan is an investigative journalist whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The San Bernardino County Sentinel, The Santa Monica Daily Press, The Long Beach Press Telegram, Oui Magazine and other regional and national publications. Janet specializes in issues pertaining to legal corruption and addresses the heated subject of adult conservatorship, revealing shocking information about the relationships between courts and shady financial consultants. She also covers issues relating to international bioweapons treaties. Her poetry has been published in Gambit, Libera, Applezaba Review, Nausea One and other magazines. Her first book, The Hitler Poems, was published in 2005. She is also the author of a tell-all book EXILE, (also available as an ebook). She currently resides abroad. You may browse through her articles (and poetry) at janetphelan.com