Let's be honest.
Much as I have been waiting and waiting for this moment, George W. Bush already left the stage, if not the building, a good while back. He's been talking about his "legacy" ever since he came to power, and he's talked of little else for the past few months, even while the world crashes around his ears.
So any sense of joy at his long overdue departure is tempered by grim realities.
I think we now live in a world where decency and integrity have gone out the door, perhaps for good, and we're just going to have to adjust to that. You cannot expect your government to do the right thing, not unless they are pushed, and even then only if they can see some clear self-interest in it. You cannot trust businesses to do the right thing either. And nobody will ever be held accountable again unless they can't afford to buy themselves out of trouble.
I guess this is what it feels like to live in a Third World country where corruption is deeply entrenched. Who'd a thought, eh?
Ted Rall and Tom Toles capture the mood (for me anyway). And Pat Oliphant too...
3 comments:
The problem is, there are just too many people in the world. As each of us becomes a more infintesimal part of the whole, each of us has less value to the species. I don't think many people sit around making this calculation directly, but subconsciously, the laws of supply and demand on the value of products applies to humanity, too. Life is gonna be cheaper in the future, G. That's why it's getting ever easier to slaughter heaps of it as Israel is doing. It would be so nice if people would voluntarily reduce our population the easy way, by having fewer, but I think it's going to happen the hard way...
Life is cheap in the Third World, it's true. Riding a bus in Peru, you look down the mountain as you round the hairpin passes on the dirt road and hear fellow passengers talking about how three buses went down that hole last year, and you cross yourself just like everybody else. Just in case.
But having less babies is not the answer, it's taking care of the ones we already have. Kids today are being taught no values, just greed and materialism.
Yeah, I am officially a grumpy old bastard now.
I'm glad I only spawned one. The ex-wife and I were so hopeful in 1988 when we chose to do that, with the end of the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Little did we know that mankind, led astray by the Bush'itters, would snatch deathfeat from the jaws of vistory...
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