This Is America

[hilemanhouse]

This is America
Written by: Carolyn Hileman


It is the back porches and the balconies, the old beat up pick up trucks and the Cadillac’s. It is the mansion on the hill and the run down shack in the valley, the skyscrapers and the little country store. It is the interstate and the country roads, the churches and the nightclubs. It is the people who believe in God and a few of those who don’t. It is the children getting on the bus and the elderly shut-ins. It the CEO on Wall Street and the single mom trying to raise two kids. This is America.


It is the opportunity to do great things or nothing at all and still exist, it is the flag flying outside the modest home and the one flying in front of the big office up town. The size of the flag means nothing it is the size of the heart of the person who flies it. It is the waitress, the cook and the cashier at the little restaurant you frequent, and it is the farmer who works from dawn to dusk to feed the people in this country. It is the truck driver who carries that heavy load with long hours and days if not weeks away from his family. This is America.


It is the woman who brings your drinks and the woman who ordered them, the man who fixes your car and the man who drives that car. It is the people who want nothing more than to build a life for themselves and the people who believe that for some reason they cannot. It is the child in school who cannot read and the teacher who would love to give them more time. It is the patient who complains to the doctor of their ailments and the doctor who cannot afford his practice anymore because some doctors did wrong. This is America.

It is the businessperson who took everything they owned and bet it on a dream only to find out that it was not their family that was supposed to benefit from it. It is the worker who works for the businessperson who cannot understand why his boss cannot afford to give them a raise. It is the union president who forces the businessperson to give the worker a raise, it is the business person who files bankruptcy and the worker and America who suffer. This is America.

It is a life that is like none other, it is the freedom to do things that other people only dream about. It is the opportunity to start from nothing and drag yourself to the top. It is the chance to make your own decisions and live with the consequences. It is filled with dreamers who despite their circumstances were able to achieve great things. As well as those who doubt in themselves and everything around them and believe that America has nothing to offer them because of race or creed. This is America.

This is a great big world we live in filed with countries that will never know the true meaning of peace and freedom. Countries that live in fear of their leaders or the leaders of other rouge countries, their people live in fear of simply going to the store, school or the mall. Some because they are women and to go alone could be their death and some because someone with a bomb might decide that is where they are going to make their statement.

I often wonder if we were put to that test how we would fare, if they came to take our children away and snatched them from our arms to make them work or use them to make us talk. If every day we were forced to make a decision of whether we kept our dignity or our lives, what would our answer be? If we had to turn on our neighbor to save our families and ourselves would we give them up without a fight? Or would we fight till the bitter end. Would we fight simply because of pride or for the future of our children, if they put a gun to our heads and demanded that we tell them where a person we loved was would we answer?

If we watched them shoot our people in the street for no apparent reason, if we were forced to register so that they would know who you were what your religion was and everything about you would we line up in an orderly fashion? If it made no difference what your race was or who you were if we were being tortured simply because we were an American, would you still be proud to called an American? What would we do if we were a target of mad men who wanted to kill us simply because This is America?

[FC Mellon]

Thank you Carolyn....that is/was absolutely beautiful! 8?)

p.s. You ask: "What would we do if we were a target of mad men who wanted to kill us simply because This is America?"

...we are 'the target of mad men'...and what we do will determine if others as gracious as you are able to continue to pen their thoughts.
Thanks again....I really appreciate your style!

[PeterAngelo]

America is where the mansion on the hill was not supposed to be built on the backs of the poor schmuck in the shack.

The coal miners who dies to make some pigs rich are also the ones who buy a the pipe dream.

We live in a dream. An ignorant dream.

Indians, slaves, Jim Crow lynchings, blah, blah, blah blah.

Now the cowards (people in general)are even afraid to speak against a retard who is killing their children with a smirk on his face.

If we live fat and safe because we burn Iraqi babies we deserve to die.

Mad men called Skull and Bones, Yalies, are your enemy - no one else.

Your fear and cowardice are what they depend on to live in the Mansions, Castles, and Cathedrals of our Evil Empire.

[castille]

America is what I call a "free country".

Not because its laws are free (why is there legal age requirements for sex and drinks?), but because its has a free ATTITUDE.

There aren't a great deal of taxes, but theres not a great deal of welfare.

That means in America, you have to have courage, ambition, and most importantly, determination in order to suceed.

Success in America is great because you can go to great heights.

But if you want a quiet, lazy life, go to Europe or Australia.Taxes are high, but if you want to hang around without doing much, you can literally live off welfare and never do an hours work.


In a sense, America has never abandoned the freedom of the wild west days. Only those who are brave enough can suceed.

[white rice]

There are two Americas, rural and urban, and you can split those up even further. I can say that at one point, America was united after 9/11. But then one American brother fears and secretely hates another Muslim American brother. Caucasian Americans secretely wonder why theres so much resentment from other Americans but never dig further than an afterthought.

And from that, I wonder, what is an American? One that follows orders without question? One that brands others traitors because dissention and protest has now become a long forgotten American tradition? Or one that lives the dream in blissful neglect willing to hand unbridled power at the empty promise of going back to sleep.

[Eulux]

God I hate people who write with a repetitive ending that they believe to mean something. this was about as trite as the top billboard song....

[CitizenCOP]

The government intentionally labeled Arabs as Terrorists, in order to build hatred and prejudices against them to ease the death toll of their children and families for what was to be capture of the major oil fields in the middle east.

[hilemanhouse]

And pigs fly...

[RebelWithanAK]

Honestly: What trite, biased, short-sighted crap that essay is. Always blaming the poor for their poverty; always blaming war and strife on 'unfounded' discontent. This is no answer. In fact, more than likely that sort of shit is the problem - elitist, disconnected, misguided recrimination that's more of a reactionary reflex than a well thought-out argument.

[Freedom2BHeard]

A Nation Damned

We are a nation damned.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We are past being able to pretend otherwise, no matter what comfort might be found in the deception. The United States has invaded and conquered a foreign nation under false pretexts. President Bush and his cronies lied us all into a war.

But that is not why we are damned.The culmination of decades of accumulated overspending by the government has created an aggregate debt for the United States federal and state governments of $14 trillion dollars. That¹s fourteen million million dollars. Or, to put it in a more personal scale, more than $48,000 for every single living human being in the United States, plus the accumulating interest.

The interest on that government debt now exceeds all the personal income tax collected by that government. That means that the government isn¹t keeping up with the interest on the debt, let alone able to pay down the principle. Even before the wars started with lies, the US Government was sinking deeper into debt by one third of a trillion dollars every year.

With Bush¹s war, the debt is increasing at another half trillion every year just at the Federal level. And because the federal Government, struggling with payments on past debts, is sending less money back to the states, the states are sinking deeper into debt as well.

But that is not why we are damned.

The national fiscal crisis is accelerating because of soaring unemployment, and the forced migration of workers from higher paying jobs to lower paying ones. This is occurring for two reasons. The first is that as tax revenues falter, the cash-strapped government raises tax rates. This increases the cost of products and services inside the United States without increasing their quality or desirability. Indeed American companies, struggling to keep prices competitive, are forced to sacrifice quality.

As an inevitable result, American companies have either been driven out of business by foreign competition able to sell superior products at lower prices, or been forced to outsource their own operations to regions with lower tax burdens.

The US Government attempted to conceal this loss of manufacturing with the so-called ³Service Economy², the ludicrous notion that one can prosper a nation by doing each other¹s laundry for a fee. But while the moving of cash back and forth for services created more opportunities for taxation, fewer and fewer products were being made within the United States for sales to foreign countries. All the while, Americans were buying foreign-made products because they were of better quality and lower price than American products. Indeed many products needed for every day life are simply not made in the USA any more. When Ampex invented the VCR, they did not even bother approaching American manufacturers but licensed directly to the Japanese.

When Seymour Cray was building his supercomputers, the chips he needed were only available from Japanese manufacturers.

Money is flowing out of the country at a billion and a half dollars per day.

And as government debt drives taxes higher, the situation can only get worse.

But that is not why we are damned.

Despite the huge government debt, despite the loss of manufacturing over the last 30 years, despite soaring unemployment, despite American women and children sleeping in alleys and eating out of trash cans, the United States government hands out trillions of dollars as gifts to their friends (who used to be their enemies) and to make war on their enemies (who used to be their friends).

But that is not why we are damned.

Maybe the problem is the Congress. Congress is supposed to represent the people, but a body composed of millionaires and lawyers can hardly be expected to understand how to actually make things work. Maybe Congress would better serve the people if it were made up of teachers, doctors, road engineers, factory workers, bakers, people who actually know how to make a nation function, build an infrastructure, and know what it is like to have to live paycheck to paycheck in a nation where the government makes more money off of your work than you do and is always asking for more.

But that is not why we are damned.

We are damned because we know all the above and do nothing. Like the Germans of 1930s Germany we see Der Fuhrer trying to distract the populace from the self-serving choices the government makes by creating a war with lies and deceptions, yet stay silent, less we be accused of being traitors to the national security. We voice our outrage when a rock star bares her breast at a sporting event, because rock stars cannot after all hurt us, raise our taxes, or conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars.

But we remain silent, or at best speak in hushed tones with a trusted few of our concerns about the government, which does hurt us, which does raise our taxes, and which has and continues to conscript our children to be crippled or killed in wars.

We are damned by our silence. We are damned by our inaction. We are damned by our fear to speak out. We are damned by our weakness. We are damned by being sheep under a government of wolves.

We are damned unless and until you realize that your anger and outrage must be targeted where it is needed, not just where it is harmless. We are damned by our willingness to be angry with those who cannot affect our lives, while remaining too afraid to be angry with those who can.

We are damned because individuals who refuse to obey the law morally offend us, but we remain enablers of a government that refuses to obey the Constitution. We are damned until WE THE PEOPLE remember that we ARE a people, and that this nation is US.

The President is not the nation. The media is not the nation. The selfish desires of a powerful few are not the nation. The Congress is not the nation.

This nation is 288 million teachers, doctors, bricklayers, road layers, bridging engineers, railroad workers, bakers, grocers, and thousands of others who actually make the nation work. But we seem to have forgotten that simple truth, that wisdom conveyed in those first three words to the Preamble to the Constitution, ³We The People².

The Constitution makes it clear that the nation is the people, and the government only a temporary custodian of our national sovereignty that rules by and only by the leave of the people.

We are damned because we have forgotten that the government is the employee of the people, and that like any employee the government is required to obey orders, not to give them.

We are damned because we have forgotten that as the employers of the government, we have the right to decide what our employees can do and more importantly, what they cannot.

We are damned because we have forgotten who is really supposed to be in charge.

[french_jew]

"What would we do if we were a target of mad men who wanted to kill us simply because This is America?"

As G. Bush said, we should "confront the danger"....and handle it as soon as possible.

You Americans are not the only "target of mad men"....but any Westerner is concerned.

Nathan

PS : Nice to meet you all

[castille]

Why not blame poor people for their poverty?

If ONE poor man can become rich, then anyone can do it. It just takes courage. Yes yes, I'm sure more poor will whine and say "But I'm poor, so therefor according to the laws of Jesus I'll be poor forever".

Well if thats your attitude, then stay poor then.