I've been writing quite a bit of fiction lately. Partly because it helps keep me thinking, gives me a creative outlet and keeps me sane by letting me get away for a minute from all the absolute rediculousness of reality. Because, let's be honest, some of us have managed to take the most brilliant time in history to be a human being and make it miserable. But that's beside the point.

In my writings, I was trying to come up with a vision for what a dystopian America would look like 30, 40, 50 years from now. In the process, I wrote down a number of things that I felt would be the hallmark of a failed American governmental experiment.

Governmental Corruption

Wealth Inequality

Social Ignorance

Lack of Ethical Corporate Oversight

Environmental Pollution

Targeted Economic Slavery

Targeted Political Disenfranchisement

Judicial Bias & Failure of Objectivity

Disrespect of, Misunderstanding of, & Failure to Accept Scientific Fact

Restrictions of Guaranteed Freedoms

Political Disregard for Legal Procedure and Protective Legislation

And I sat there, looking at that list as it got longer, and longer, and longer, and I stopped writing.

I had to. I just had to. Because I realized I wasn't writing about a fictional dystopia. I was writing about America as it is today. A morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt place, devoid of any hope for true fairness and equality without a fight so strong from so many that the only appropriate word that could really define the change that it needed was "Revolution". And it made me sad.

I am not an "emo" guy. I am a fairly stoic, sometimes cranky individual that could physically pass for a stereotype skinhead if you're the kind who judges a book by its cover. But the state of our nation just makes me want to cry sometimes, seeing how everything our great grandparents and grandparents fought to build is being torn down and shredded by something so base and rediculous as stupidity and greed. By nature of our economic philosophy, we have actually taken the dumbest people in the country and placed them in the highest positions of power. Both corporately and governmentally, we have given our fate over to people with the foresight of a flea.

Winston Churchill probably said it best when he said "Americans always do everything right, but not before they try everything else first."

But my concern is that we have somehow convinced ourselves that all this dicking around actually is the right way. We've lost sight of the fact that this was an experiment, and experiments are not perfect. They need to be tweaked, and adjusted, and redone. Sometimes many times, until the hypothesis can be stated to be either correct or false. But the experiment must always have an end. It can't be the hypothesis itself. At some point you need to take a look at the data, pull the plug and start again. Give it another try in a different way. A way that makes sense and works with the changing hypothesis, the changing world.

Because right now we are doomed to repeat the same exact failures we tried once before, and which we know to have failed.

And it's all based on pure and simple ignorance.

There's a common saying that "You can't fix stupid, stupid just has to fix itself." Well that's just ducky, considering the idiot champions of the Darwin Awards are going to bring the rest of us down with them.

I intend to keep writing here.

With luck, a few of you will agree with my rantings, and maybe somewhere we can do a little good in the world. Jt couldn't hurt to start here at home.

In the meantime.... soldier on. The war against ignorance is one we have to fight from the day we're born. It cannot be outright won. But if we are implacable we can maybe set an example that appeals to the sensibilities of the greater public.

You can call me Rooster. And this is the first of the Daily Crow.