Open Source » Blog Archive » BOTU

Open Source » Blog Archive » BOTU

As I enjoy the public radio show Open Source enormously, and seek to make their job of being excellent as easy as I can, I will not be participating in their Blogs of the Union thread…just kidding. They’ll just have to make up for my entry in volume, hopefully…

The State of the Union is bruised, bloodied and sore. We have been tread upon in secret: behind closed doors, by parties unknown, in the deep of night, singly and in groups. We have been deceived by our leaders, by our proxies and by ourselves. We have lingered too long at the trough, and now pay with our liberty, sated and lazy with rhetoric and a false sense of security.

As the fog burns away from our conscience, we slowly realize that simply put we have been had — we are not better off than we were four years ago, or five years ago, or even last year. For those of us who passed up the free eats of feeling a war on terror would make us a safer nation, no matter what the cost, we feel like the lone sentry in a vast field of sleeping soldiers — unable to wake our fellow citizens to the coming threats.

For those of us who had seconds and thirds, suddenly it seems that “all you can eat” has some strings attached…and those strings may be tied to our sons and daughters as they fight and die and survive injuries that only a few of us can even imagine, and then only in our nightmares.

We are past recriminations of one for the other: we only have our fellow citizens to look to for any hope of rebuilding any semblance of respect for America in the eyes of the world. Our government has ceased to represent us, they have forsaken our trust and given themselves powers which we were last horrified by during the reign of Watergate and “break-ins.” Now, of course, you don’t need to physically “break in” anywhere.

I look to tomorrow for an awakening, one not religious but patriotic, where being a patriot means questions, and consequences and activity not seen for many years. I look to it like one does that “bright shining city on a hill” but without the innocence that was a hallmark of a certain type of America, and is now a luxury no American can afford to indulge.

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