Are Things Really This Bad?

This might end up being a double post. Fittingly, Blogger had some sort of meltdown recently that deleted this post the first time I put it up. By the headline alone I'm sure you can start to see why it's fitting that it got messed up.

Here's the rest.

My quiet friend Brian was once asked by a frustrated fellow high-school student, "How come you never talk?!"

Brian replied, "What's there to say?"

I've been described as negative by a tremendous number of people.

I reply, "What's there to be positive about?"

Am I alone in the feeling that things have been going from bad to worse in just about every way in the world? Are things as bad as they seem to me, or is it my ugly negativity?

There are no heroes in government right now, and barely a handful of people even worth talking about. Most of my heroes are from the private sector, and they're dead.

There are heroes, though: SEAL Team Six, and the people who helped them find Osama bin Laden, right?

The SEALs, certainly; but the CIA? How much could a semi-knowledgeable person celebrate that sinister organization? Does this victory nullify its many tremendous defeats and injustices?

But am I alone in being troubled by just how jubilantly people were celebrating bin Laden's death? Didn't it reek of overcompensation, like when Bill Murray was disturbingly overdoing it during the snowball fight in Groundhog Day? 

I live in a country that was so starved to celebrate anything at all that some of its citizens took to the streets, chanting and repeating that three-lyric wonder, "U.S.A.!" upon the news that some SEALs had killed the man behind the attack that pierced the hull of the nation. 

I would loudly join them in the streets if I knew his death also meant the death of his ideas. But it doesn't, so I am only satisfied that there is one less murderous animal out there, and I am particularly glad it is this one. 

Which is where I join the chorus of those who are frustrated to find our military fighting wars in three countries except the one that was housing the man who had actually attacked America.

Things appear to be so absurdly Orwellian right now that it's almost something you can't talking about—like the question, "Why do you think we're really here?" It's so big that you can't bring it up without looking stupid.

But it's right where we appear to find ourselves. Our Congress is generating profound debt, and clapping themselves on the back over it, and yet my idiotic fellow Americans continue this ugly cycle: "Ninety percent of Americans want all of Congress fired and replaced—except, of course, for their district's representative."

War. Debt. Security over Liberty.

 

Two trillion dollars were created and distributed, and we're not allowed to know where a lot of it went. The biggest robbery in the history of civilization, and it's another thing that's so big we're not allowed to talk about it, because we know it's there but we don't have a handle on it.

I mean, I know they didn't steal my money. All they did was make my money worth a lot less, while they compensated for the devaluation by sheer quantity rewarded.

Too big to talk about. Why are we really here?

Are things really this bad?

What's the difference between President Obama and President Bush? That's not the setup to a joke; that's a legitimate question, and the answer appears to be, and I'm putting this in quotes because that's where it belongs, "ObamaCare."

Our country is underwater, and we're dying of thirst. We've got millions of homeless people and millions of empty homes.

If the differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama are as marginal as they appear, then does the President really make any decisions at all, or was Bill Hicks right?

Am I being negative, or am I reacting to what's out there?

And yet here is a bolt of positivity:

I am starting a company. I am bringing stories and ideas to the world.

Why can't negativity be a fuel?