Is America Moving Forward or Backward?

As we get nearer and nearer to 2,500 Americans killed in Iraq, I have to ask myself why or for whom did these troops pay the ultimate sacrifice? George Bush? Rumsfeld? Their leaders? Their fellow soldiers?

I think if you could ask them, they'd tell you they died for the same reasons that everyone who has served in the US Armed Forces from the Revolutionary War forward has died. They gave their lives for their wives, their children, their children's children, their parents, and for you and me. They sacrificed themselves to an ideal - that all men are created equal and possess inalienable rights - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Almost two thousand, five hundred Americans have died in the past three years for those reasons.

Most people think that America is a huge melting pot - a place where peoples of different races, nationalities, religions and sexual persuasions have come together to live and work, learn and share, in a homogeneous collective governed by laws and principles that effect all equally. Of course, this is not the case.

In the past six years, America has become more and more a country of tribes - groups of conflicting people trying to successfully nudge our government into serving their interests at the exclusion of other groups. We're whites, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, conservatives, liberals, religious, irreligious, wealthy, or poor. Our government representatives seem to respect only the wishes of the wealthy - the corporate powers that give them the money they need to get themselves elected.

This elite class has set itself up in a position to decide who deserves the opportunity to prosper and even who deserves the opportunity for higher education. We seem to be regressing back to that time in history when there was an aristocracy and the poor, with no middle class.

In the Middle Ages, it was thought that wealth and knowledge were finite - that is to say they were thought to be commodities that could be spread too thin if the great unwashed were given the chance to partake in them. To give you an idea of how the aristocracy considered it, imagine if you would, having a small bottle of liquid gold paint and you wanted to use it to paint over some bricks. The amount of paint in your bottle might cover say, ten bricks. If you diluted the paint with oil or water, you might be able to paint about thirty bricks, but they certainly would not look as good as the bricks that were undiluted. And there is no way you would have enough paint, no matter how you diluted it, to cover all the bricks in your possession. Hence, the aristocracy did not care to dilute the opportunities to gain wealth and/or knowledge.

For example, if a scholar wished to publish a book before the printing press came in use, it was published in Latin. This made the book available to scholars throughout the Western world as they were all schooled in Latin. But the poor were unable to educate themselves with it because they could neither read nor write - especially Latin. If you look at opportunities for the lower classes here in America today, someone seems to be pushing us back into times when only the rich could gain access to wealth and knowledge.

This is why the coming election is so important, folks. We need to get people into office (both nationally and locally) that will live up to the ideal for which our soldiers have been giving their lives over the past three years. The people need to regain control and rid ourselves of the corporate influences that have sucked the blood out of the middle class during the past decade. Republican or Democrat. Both parties cast votes recently to give the wealthiest 1% of Americans a tax cut of over $400,000. These elitist must go.

The people that would send our children off to die in a foreign war for the sake of corporate bottom lines must also go. And people who think their race, religion, or sexuality makes them somehow better than other Americans must also be voted out of office.

Then and only then can this country regain our true moral compass and head down the road toward being a real melting pot and not just a bunch of warring tribes trying to be better than their neighbors.

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