Having just spent a week in the one place in the world that makes me feel more at home and human than anywhere else, I feel like utter shit about certain things. When abroad I\’ve always easily concealed my American citizenship, which has always been easy with my easily influenced ears. In the past, though, it wasn\’t really a big deal to be American; a lot of people even sort of envied it. These days, though, everywhere I went people were shit talking America, our politics, our government, and the American citizens directly to my face even after realizing I was American.
Fine and dandy, I know we\’ve really fucked up hardcore and made a real mess of things, but jesus, I\’m just a peon! I vote, I write, I phone, I use my consumer power to make a positive difference where I can, but there isn\’t anything else I can really do. I\’m just a little nothing in the scale of American politics, and my little nothingness is part of only a very tiny minority of people in this country who feel that 1) if the Devil truly exists, the Devil is Bush; 2) America has really fucked up this time; 3) Kerry is really no better at all.
If the first American Revolution was about freedom from the British (which lead to what used to be our ten commandments, ie, The Bill of Rights, which has now seemingly been replaced with Moses\’ scrawlings from the Mount), perhaps the second American Revolution needs to be about freedom from the Patriots.
