At first it was a slow fall and maybe repairable.
At least I thought so back in 2005 when I joined the ranks of attorneys fighting for the habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees. But it has been a slippery slope and the downward spiral started with the dumbing down of my fellow country people. The dumbing down began in earnest in the early 1980's with Reagan and his malicious crew. Pulling money from education was a long term project but it went hand in hand first, with cable TV and the fixation with watching the tube 24 hours a day, instead of engaging in anything resembling critical thinking.
And then following quickly on those heels was the "war on drugs" -which was really a war against people of color here in the good ole U S of A. This in turn resulted in the mass incarceration of black and brown people and the booming prison business. It wasn't quite the indefinite detention without charges that took place with Guantanamo but in some respects it was very similar. The people of color were charged and convicted but many, oh so many, were convicted falsely. Confessions tortured out of people, many of whom were the fallout of both the war on education and the war on drugs.
And then came the internet. The distraction and the disinformation coincided with a population that was (and is) clueless. There of course was much more going on in between but in a nutshell these events helped my fellow Americans elect a two bit mentally unbalanced con man, who had already squandered millions on failed business ventures (resulting in five bankruptcies over his adult life) to become the president of my country.
And although he is inept at most things, he does know how to make himself rich and how to surround himself with loyal idiots who will not question anything that he does. No matter the harm to this country or the world. The con man is not only bankrupting this country, morally and financially, he is wreaking havoc on a fragile world. And he cares not.
And "his people" care not.
And here we are. Free falling and taking the rest of the world with us.
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