Once upon a time - after a ten year-long struggle to repair the damage from the Depression created by republican oligarchs - American resolve, industriousness and grit fought a world war on two fronts and won; Under the constant threat of nuclear war and Soviet hegemony, Americans designed the fastest aircraft ever built in the late 1950s and a short time later figured out how to send men to the moon and explore it - in person - within ten years... using SLIDE RULES.

We built dams, canals and bridges, wired an entire country for electricity, created what used to be a world-class entertainment industry out of nothing and built an interstate highway system - ditched vacuum tubes for integrated circuits - morphed from black and white to color - even left desktop computers for smart phones. Today we can't even agree on money to fix the damned pot holes in our streets.

We used to be fearless, aggressive and strong in the pursuit of progress. We used to at least PRETEND to care about one another, even if it might have been out of convenience. Today, we have a majority in government that not only despises anyone who earns less than a quarter million dollars a year, they're actually proud of it and brag about it - listen to anything that comes out of Romney or Palin and you'll get a great cross-section of the wealthy elite that has become American leadership - live and direct from corporate boardrooms to the halls of Congress.

We used to legitimately pride ourselves in our standard of living and quality of life with a robust Middle Class that fueled the world's most powerful economy based on demand; today's business models rely on increasing "stockholder value" by lowering America's workplace standards and eliminating benefits and retirement options, sending jobs to countries formerly regarded as enemies and matching workplace conditions and security with those of third world countries and the wealthy elite's Communist business partners in the Far East.

We refined x-ray and CT scan technology, developed medications and treatments for illnesses that used to be fatal, created medically useful magnetic resonance imaging and provided the bulk of research that cracked the human genetic code. But today, while Americans kill themselves by the tens of thousands from drunk driving and tobacco, the majority in government prefers a "laissez-faire" approach to the carnage; and yet one American dies from Ebola in a Texas hospital and the nation almost literally shutters it's windows, locks it's doors and trembles in a fetal position in the corner of a darkened room. The President appoints a "tsar", the media provides 24/7 updates and the neocons carve another notch on the club they use to browbeat the few of us who recognize this for the farce that it is - all this from the same people who regard the idea of national health care as a Marxist step towards socialism.

Jacques Cousteau and, 2 decades later, Al Gore were out there warning us about what we were doing to our environment by not carefully regulating our civilization and its consumption of natural resources, migrating to new sources of energy and managing our waste. All these years later there are still people in responsible positions of high authority who are doing everything they can - financially and legislatively - to prevent efforts to stop environmental cleanup and move from coal and petroleum to cleaner sources of energy - all for the sake of profit.

And my point? None of the people taking the country down this regressive path of neoconservative destruction could have been elected without the "... advice and consent" of the American People.

Just what the hell happened to us as a country? Greed can't possibly be the only reason... our history has several examples of greed being defeated by the will of the People when the powerful wealthy elite attempted to financially enslave the Many. And 9-11? Nobody shuttered their windows and locked their doors when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. (I remember that the neocons didn't have much to say about that one - after all, McVeigh was being "anti-gubbermint" and "...exercising his First Amendment 'rights'...", as Limbaugh put it back then).

Too much inbreeding? Too many reruns of "Married With Children"? People decided to stop thinking when they cancelled the "Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour"?

It's inconceivable to me how today, in this modern age of mass access to information, people like Scott Brown, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindall, Paul Ryan, Saxby Chambliss, Michelle Bachmann and their kind consistently manage to get elected to high positions authority - Kochs or no Kochs - unless the American people genuinely don't care what happens to this country or, for that matter, their own world anymore.

Thoughts, anyone?