21st Century Rip Van Winkle

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Have you ever looked around you and wondered? What happened? Where am I? How did this once great nation decline so far so fast? How did common sense get completely annihilated from the modern American citizen's working brain? It is almost like you went to sleep and woke up twenty years later; and everything had changed. Well there is an old fable about such an experience. Yes, it is the tale of Rip Van Winkle.

Now in the original tale ol' Rip he was always ready to lend a hand to a neighbor, or work for someone elses gain, but he always negated to do his own work. Therefore, his farm was the saddest of the community. Such is the case of the GOP today. We are all off doing work and helping our communities, but when it comes to our party, strengthening our republic, well we'd rather go fishing than do the hard work of preserving Liberty for our progeny. Now Rips wife was known to nag him quite relentlessly to do the work he should be doing. A modern equivelant to Rush Limbaugh no doubt. Heh hee, Rush as the nagging housewife? Ironic no? But in this analogy it fits.

So one day Rip goes off to the mountains and there is Henry Hudson and the boys playing nine pin. This would be like the cultural media of today, the movies, the games, the gadgets and the social media, altogether forming the magical jug of elixir that will eventually put Rip to sleep. The 'Hudson' media will entice us to play games and drink and never worry about our obligations as citizens. And of course eventually it all begins to tire our souls and the eyelids of our conciousness become so heavy that we cannot resist the deep slumber.

Upon awakening we can no longer recognize our surroundings. To be sure there are some things that seem slightly familiar but it is all so strange that we almost don't recognize it at all. Stumbling around the village, no one knows us; we don't see anyone we're familiar with. We walk through the town and watch the people going about their day and we cannot put the puzzle pieces together. We find out that in this new world in which we have awoken:

• the American flag is offensive in our schools
• protecting our borders is racist
• drilling for our own oil is unpopular and discouraged by our leaders but we'll assist others in drilling then buy the oil from them
• killing an enemy is perfectly fine, yet interrogating him to prevent attack on our citizenry is not
• spending way more than we have is unsustainable but cutting back is impossible
• the Constitution is meaningless and can be interpreted in opposite fashions by two legal scholars
• we can't use our military to support a friend, but we can use it to support rebels that we don't even know
• our military is sent to fight, but then told not to fight too hard; if they do we arrest them.
• we send young men to die all alone, then leave them all alone again when they get home
• we can't fight terrorists too hard with our Army; it will be too offensive. But we can bomb sovereign nations with drones, we call them surgical strikes; makes all of that collateral damage easier to swallow.
• the votes of millions of people can be overturned by one judge who can't even interpret the Constitution
• cases go to the Supreme Court with everyone in the country knowing where 8 judges stand, 1 judge decides for us all, apparently depending on what he had for breakfast.
• politicians no longer tell 'white lies' or obfuscate. They now flat out lie through their teeth about known facts with no one to hold them accountable.
• the Speaker of the House laughs when asked about Constitutional government
• election machines show up with thousands of votes already on them, multiple citizens complain about their votes being changed right before their eyes, votes are 'found' in trunks of cars; yet after the election, the story dies, no one investigates, no one goes to jail.
• I can't buy an incandescent bulb for my reading lamp
• a small minnow can stop a multi-million dollar development project costing taxpayers millions of dollars and jobs for Americans
• construction is suddenly considered a 'job that Americans just won't do'
• not a single job is created by a poor man, yet we hate the 'rich'
• millions of Americans pay zero taxes, while collecting from their fellow citizens, then have the audacity to ask others to pay their 'fair share'
• teachers teach our kids how to have sex, gay or straight, but can't seem to teach them Reading Writing and Arithematic; then cry we don't pay them enough and they need more benefits.
• we protect an animals egg, but not a human embryo
• we have an entire Department of the federal government to make us 'less dependent on foreign oil'; yet we are more dependent on foreign oil
• we arrest investment brokers for 'Ponzi' schemes while the U.S. government runs the largest Ponzi scheme in history
• we insist that banks loan money to people who can't afford it then we wonder why housing markets fail
• we back our money with nothing; then we print money; then we print some more; then we print even more; and we can't figure out why the dollar is falling in value

I could go on and on. All of the above are recognizable as complete stupidity by most thinking human beings on planet earth regardless of their education. All are nonsensical on the face of it. And yet, here we are. We re-elect politicians who foist this idiocy upon us. We worship them as if they are really so smart that we just can't figure it out, so we let them handle it. When in fact they are self-serving imbeciles. We play our games and watch our shows and buy our toys while these idiots destroy our country. Then, a few weeks before election time, if even then, we look up from our computer screens and ask, "Who's that cute one with the nice smile? He talks very well. I'll vote for him."
Henry Hudson and the boys really did a number on this nation. Let's go play some nine pin...

by: Keith D. Rodebush