Opinion/Editorial

THE COMING OF THE IMPERIUM

They passed the new tax bill. By the end, the document wasn’t even fully legible or readable. It was all caged together with hand written notes and amendments. What’s really in it is anybody’s guess, except it will be the real start of the punishing of the serfs, peasants, ill, old, poor and downtrodden. That is what the artificial appointment of Trump, and the revealed truth about republicans, is bringing this nation to. It has become the Imperium envisioned by George Lucas in Star Wars. Earth Wars would have been a more accurate title for that movie. And, as Joseph Campbell predicted (the real creative mental force behind the Star Wars story) in his anthropological books, the formation of an ever-more selfish and punishing empire leads to only one result. The appearance, and then continuance, of revolution and rebellion (as portrayed in the films), will become the existence of many Americans for some time to come. For the last thirty years it has been building, and it will continue to build until the bottom of society is so beaten down that it has no choice but to rise up and try to take everything back. Unfortunately, as Joe so accurately foretold from his studies of cultures past, there is no non-violent way to accomplish this ‘adjustment’ across all walks of human life on this earth. Read the final draft of the tax bill, and see for yourself. The republicans have already established a foundation for the direction they want to go in to pay for this gouging of the country’s economics. They are going to take the VA money. They are going to take the Social Security money. They are going to take the Medicare money. They are not veterans, and they don’t need social security or Medicare. They have money and they want more! And they are going to get it. Your job, if you are reading this and not one of THEM, is to make sure they get it….and take it with them.

I was a republican. I was a full-blooded raging young, and then middle-aged, republican. I was an alternate delegate at the Nixon convention after I got home from Vietnam. I was the campaign chairman for Bob Dole’s presidential run for Madison back in the day. I believed in fiscal responsibility, no deficits, working for what you earned. I believed in building the country’s infrastructure. It’s roads, railroads, space program and scientific labs and projects. I believed in fighting wars but only if attacked. I believed in all sorts of stuff that I still believe in. But the republican party got right up and walked away from me. They didn’t leave me in the cold. They went out into the cold, and I refused to go with them. I refused to be come heartless. I refused to support wars invented by the military industrial complex to replace the Cold War. I also fought after Vietnam when I was CIA. I refused to look the other way when the country’s road building ground to a virtual halt and began to erode, along with its bridges. I refused to accept all the closed factories with their broken window as being modern examples of distressed architecture. I refused to accept shipping those factory jobs off to other lands, and then buying the stuff produced there back to support those lands and people, and not my own. I refused to accept the obvious fact that aging white males took over almost everything and run it today, including both Houses of Congress.  I refused to become blind, and dumb, and put my head down to work on my own thing, to do my own thing, to mind my own business. This country is my business, and yours too, or at least it was. Now most of this country is owned by a few mean-spirited, nasty and downright killingly selfish bastards who act as if they did not have mothers, only fathers.

Where did America’s heart go? Where did its hope go? Where did its inventive genius go? Why has it decided to rearm itself personally after building such a behemoth of military power worldwide that is beyond describing without losing all credibility? What is America so afraid of, and why will it not look back at itself to discover what it should really be afraid of?

Read the new tax bill, although you probably will not.   It isn’t written in a limited 140-character text. It isn’t short enough. The most powerful and largest companies in the nation are all about talking and writing. The most powerful companies in America fifty years ago were all about creating and doing. What are you going to do? Choosing to do nothing is a choice in and of itself. It is a choice to suffer, to submit. How long will the majority of American’s choose to suffer? How long will it allow an owned mass media to maintain the ability to convince this country that it is right where it is supposed to be, rather than what it should be, afraid?

I was a republican. I was a young full-blooded raging republican, and then a disillusioned middle-aged republican. I can’t be a democrat and to be an independent is to be so far from the sidelines that the back of a stadium parking lot would be closer to the action. I’m an American now, and that makes me this lonely character running, speaking and writing in near silence, without real power to change anything, but trying, like the little mouse standing to face the diving eagle with his middle finger raised, to rage against what has happened, and to hope that those who follow will not forget that they can rise to become great again. If they will act. Read the tax bill. With the leadership all of us currently have, you are going to suffer, we are all going to suffer. Don’t choose to respond by doing nothing.

All republicans are not cold, selfish or in full agreement with the direction the party has taken, just as no group of humans can ever be said to be completely the product of one hundred percent agreement among all of its members. The current political situation, however, is fraught with historical precedence.

The potential for violent change being brought home to a nearly clueless American population is not something to be taken lightly or ignored.

~~James Strauss