USA USA usa

I am no Yankee Doodle Dandy. I hate fireworks and I am NOT related to your Uncle Sam, at least not genetically anyway, although we all share the blood on his hands. It especially bothers me when I see pathetic demonstrations of seemingly rampant faux patriotism. 

Please explain, again, how professional football players calling out a militarized police force that kills blacks with a 2.5% greater frequency than their paler neighbors by taking a knee during the playing of musical propaganda, lethal action often unprovoked and illegal, not to mention immoral and unethical, to call attention to a civil felonious criminal reality is unpatriotic and disrespectful of the flag? 

I don’t have the time or the desire to document the rampant gas lighting that takes place in the name of patriotism. Patriotism as justification for a trillion dollar military gift to arms manufacturers and defense contractors? I wonder if the bombs that we drone drop on innocent civilians, aka collateral damage, that are averaging 80% more this year alone, are painted with stars and stripes?

Our foreign policy is based solely on the totalitarian capitalistic premise that if we cannot buy you, we will bomb you until we get the resources that your country has and that we want. When I hear the puppets at that murdoch network, via some FB post by a watchdog whistle-blower, whine about how their deceitful master is being libeled by the left for collusion with a foreign government, I gotta laugh. That is our history and while we didn’t invent, we surely copied it successfully. We, and yes I’ll invoke the plurality of inclusion here, have so much blood on our hands, are so filthy, have so many skeletons in our closets and dirty secrets, that we may never come fully clean. Without a doubt not on this watch anyway. 

So I get a little irked when (somewhat) innocent institutions like baseball, The Blue Angels, tomorrow’s 4th of July parades, the second amendment, apple pie and Uncle Sam all get lumped under the red, white and blue umbrella of national patriotism. 

Because as of this writing, we suck. The only things we lead the world in are number of people incarcerated and the money we spend of defense. Rather dubious wouldn’t you say? I can hear the right-wing trumpsters now…

USA, USA, USA.

Clean up your act America you are a disgrace. 

Here is a cheat sheet for radical reform that I borrowed from Saul Alinsky. This in case you might have wondered if I have anything positive to contribute to the resistance. I do.