In the past few weeks I have heard President Obama and Governor Romney on the campaign trail saying this election is a time for the country to choose its path. Surveys show most Americans thing we are on the wrong path - I am one of them. While doing this, the first thing Americans need to come to terms with is the ability to be honest with itself about itself. We are so wrapped up in partisanship and nationalism that we fail to view the full picture, being in denial of the truth, and living in an echo chamber of propaganda indoctrinating into us a viewpoint, at times with no basis in facts.
Consider the two recent cases of 'creative editing' at NBC. The first was the George Zimmerman 911 tape, in which NBC purposely advances the narrative that Zimmerman was stalking the hated colored man and shot him down like a rabid dog. The more recent was portraying Mitt Romney as an out of touch elitist, amazed by the touch screen menu at a WaWa's. Yet the next evening I found myself watching Brian Williams and pretending with the rest of America that I was watching news rather than a puppet show.
We need to be honest, even when it hurts. We have a retired George Bush and a sitting Barack Obama who are war criminals. We have a young man, Private Manning, locked in a military prison for exposing war crimes.
We have an attorney general and a president who seem to be complicit in running an illegal gun operation to arm the Mexican drug cartels which resulted in the murder of a border patrol agent. Memo's indicate this was done in order to build support for suppressing our constitutional right to bear arms.
We have a president who has circumvented the constitution he vowed to uphold numerous times, the most recent being his vote buying overturning of Congressional action on the Dream Act, implementing it by dictatorial fiat.
We have a congress and president preparing the tools and legislation for a totalitarian police state, from the Patriot Act, in its ever-more-intrusive form, a president picking terrorists to be assasinated on a weekly basis and claiming the authority to do the same to American citizens here in the US. And, along with a complicit congress, is preparing to fill the skies with 30,000 drones to conduct surveillance and who knows what else here in America.
We need to have a conversation, but it needs to be an honest conversation.
