This isn’t going to be one of those well-researched diaries with a coherent “point” and lots of links to back it up.

Folks, I need your help.  I need your opinions, your thoughts and a whole big dose of your wisdom.
I don’t own a television so I cannot “watch” any news coverage besides what’s available on C-SPAN’s website and various other internet video portals such as YouTube.  Honestly, I tend to watch Russian-language news, if anything, to improve my language skills.

But I do READ a whole slew of news reports online from American and western media (in English).  I read probably most of the big “left” blogs and a variety of customized news feeds.  And most importantly, I do keep in regular contact with some very good friends of mine in USA who tell me what THEY see with their own eyes in their own lives.

It’s quite obvious a whole lot of VERY big things are going wrong.  The Iraq war is huge, mainly because people are fighting and dying and nobody seems to really know why.  There is also a secondary war in Afghanistan where people are fighting and dying.  

There’s global warming and whatever the “controversies” are over that, there is certainly no controversy that a whole lot of global POLLUTING and POISONING is going on.  

Then there’s all the hullabaloo over “oil” (petroleum), which BESIDES the price of gasoline at the pumps and BESIDES the wars and strategies to implement command and control over petroleum (from propping up ruthless dictatorships to coups to actual wars) there’s the underlying issue that the entire economy and a HUGE majority of people’s lives are critically dependent on a finite, extremely toxic and polluting substance which is harmful to extract, harmful to refine and harmful to USE.

Then there’s the incredible encroachment of the police state, from “extraordinary renditions” to designating people “enemy combatants” to the abolishment of habeas corpus to tapping and bugging your phones, draconian monitoring of vast amounts of information collected into databases right on down to actual police violence from tasering to racial and other forms of profiling, stalking, infiltration, harassment and arrests.

Add that to the “war on drugs” and the overall war on a huge sector of the population, leading to exponential growth in the number of citizens actually behind bars, on probation and on parole.

There’s huge problems in the economy, including the “bail outs” of certain sectors, the “subprime mortgage crisis”, jobs disappearing, outsourcing, right on down to things like both food shortages as well as huge spikes in food PRICES, even on native plants that people can easily grow themselves in their gardens like tomatoes.

Add that to a combination of a broken medical system, where people are either completely not treated at all or denied treatment, plus people who are receiving inadequate care for their most basic needs AND a fatal combination of sick, chemically-laden, polluted and toxic food and water.  

Because I don’t live in USA, I would also include my neighbors, who live with the completely schizophrenic and broken American policy on relations with the 200+ countries of the globe with their almost 6 billion people, who suffer in so many ways, including living in unspeakable conditions due to American sanctions, American aid propping up and bolstering corrupt and dictatorial regimes, crushingly unfair American economic trade agreements and let’s not forget those dying from actual American bullets, bombs and landmines, whether fired BY a flesh-and-blood American or else just sold (or re-sold) to the millions of merchants of death and corrupt, evil governments.

And last but not least, large-scale corporate malfeasance which leads to everything from mines collapsing to pension funds getting wiped out, unions broken up or stomped on, employees treated like cattle and indentured servants, massive lay-offs, corruption and bribery and strong-arming legislation and politicians, tax loopholes and huge pay differences.

It also literally breaks my heart to see how ignorant my people are, where learning or speaking anything but English is not only considering outlandishly exotic but virtually “traitorous”, where the most vapid and time-wasting drivel is given top priority, where nothing has any value unless it is ENTERTAINING, leading to words such as “infotainment” and “edutainment” and TV is king.

This, in short, is the BAD news about America, the USA, the land I was born in and still is emblazoned on my passport.  You certainly don’t need me to tell you all of the above.  It’s there to see in a million ways in every newspaper, on every channel and right in front of your eyes if you live in the USA.

Where I need your wisdom is I need to hear what’s GOOD about America, the United States of America, right NOW.  Baseball and jazz and cornbread are awesome, but I want to hear what’s good right NOW.  Maybe it’s a little thing, maybe it’s a big thing but I want to hear about it.

I KNOW there’s good news out there about America and Americans, right now, right this minute.  And while focusing and being aware of the bad stuff is important, I think we need a dose of the good stuff so we can remember where we’re going here, where we WANT to go, so we can turn to our friends and neighbors and politicians and government and say, “Yeah, we want more of THIS stuff.”

Sound good?  Good!  Can’t wait to hear what you have to say 🙂

Pax