BuzzFlash Reader Contribution

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Dear America, It's Time for Change

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by John D. Byrne

Dear America,

I watch and read the news these days like some waking dream from a bad ‘Mission Impossible’ episode. The evil rightwing loonies, after decades of usurping the morals and fabric of American cultural and social society, have gone global with their ambitions for Empire. They have closeted their own citizens from the world, chained them with unrealistic ideals and massive consumer debt and has allowed them to be fed upon by amoral corporate greed while feeding them half truth and opinion as they undermine the relevance of facts.

This war and the preceding attack of September 11, 2001 are as a direct result of a desire to control the Middle East. America’s undeclared intention of the last quarter century has been provoked into being by giving twisted idealists, in power by the seat of their Judicial pants, the perfect excuse to lash out in a direction of their choosing. Having been forced to play the Big Lie so close to the wind, they have been forced since to further remove themselves from a sphere of blame, to merely being issuers of the new Republican Reality. Whatever anyone else’s problem is, it’s not theirs.

While your countrymen and women are only now beginning to crash from the media fed trance state of infotainment and flavoured facts, your abusers sit in the White House ready to unfold the parameters of The New American Century or some other tosh. You do not, unfortunately have very much time. It seems that reality, having been abused so often by the wanton cruelty of ‘happy endings’ to news items, has played the last joke on an uncaring or uninformed citizenry.

The climate is changing, the ice caps and large icebergs are melting at a faster rate today, than has ever been thought possible. Within ten years our average annual seasons will bear no relation to historical trends for temperature and weather. Times, as they say, are getting interesting.

It may not have occurred to your mainstream press to investigate but most of the rest of the world now regards America to be a renegade dictatorship where in Orwellian fashion, the masses are kept distracted and fractured while the eternal war is fought. We see what your president is doing, what he is and is not saying, we know where this is going. At a point in time when the next properly elected president of America is finally able to undo some of the damage being done to your country and culture, he or she will have the additional hill to climb in returning to the world stage and to be seen as anything other than an aggressive junkie with a list of issues almost as scary as its debt and cost to the rest of the world.

For America, and for the world, several large changes in climate, the scarcity and replacement cost of petrochemicals, a growing series of challenges across the African and Asian continents are looking at us from the very near future. This is not supposed to be a dramatic statement; this is a current representation of what most of the other world nations are now beginning to deal with. While other countries are beginning to make choices that encompass ‘externalities’ and environmental costs, America is now using the leverage of its last weapon, the dollar to invoke silence from its creditors with the threat of devaluation and default while it continues its grab for oil and gas like a alcoholic in an off-license. Strange to think that 92% of the world is to be held hostage by the lunatic ravings of a fraction of the 8% of the global population that calls the US of A home.

For all that I love your country and respect your history in becoming this defining generation of Americans, I am worried and frightened at what will befall the world, if you are not resolute. I can only believe in that which none can challenge – change. It is the cornerstone of our evolution to date and is the necessary action we will have to undertake if this consumption addicted society is to have any hope of metamorphosis at all.

John D. Byrne
Dublin, Ireland

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION