masterwordsmith-unplugged

Cowboy Bob aka The Sagebrush Philosopher is one of the few bloggers that I have been following devotedly. He was born and raised in the State of Wyoming. He attended High School at Thermopolis, Wyoming and has a Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from U.C. Berkeley. His insightful and incisive writing is powerfully and passionately written. With much wisdom, sincerity and patriotism, his posts are not only enlightening but eerily familiar if you get my drift. Honestly, I wish I could write like he does. It is with much pleasure that I share with you Sagebrush Philosopher's post.

The barrage of information that has invaded my senses during the past few months has been some of the most sobering and despairing that I can recall during my lifetime. I cannot believe what is happening to us, as a people, our country and the world in which we live.

I have endeavored to identify the root cause(s) of what has brought us to the point where all hope has been abandoned, but where there might be some faint hope of saving us from ourselves. What we would have to do in order to simply understand and reverse the forces we have set in motion and continue to nurture seems insurmountable.

We are, by our very nature, social beings. I do not believe we were intended to live our lives as loners. We were meant to be a part of something bigger than any one of us. We were, as the laws of nature have said, meant to be a part of something where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I think we have simply forgotten or deliberately chosen to ignore that fundamental principle of life. We have evolved into a world where the singular predominates. We live by “I,” “Me,” and “Mine.” I don’t see where any great effort is made to cultivate and respect any notion of “We,” “Us,” or “Ours,” which might serve as the guiding principles by which we were intended to live. What brought us to the point where the singular is all that matters; that it is noble to pursue only those aspects of life that will nurture my sense of self-entitlement or self-indulgence, at the expense of a greater common good? Where did we buy into the notion that anything having to do with “me” is more important than that which focuses on “us?”

At the end of the day, that is what has led us to becoming a people who are totally self-absorbed and patently selfish in our life’s pursuits. We are now living with the second generation of “spoiled brats,” who know absolutely nothing except that which will satiate their every desire. And, do I blame them? Not on your life. They are what they are because we encouraged and permitted them to become the socially aberrant beings they are. It is because we failed them. We did not take the time and effort to teach them that there is something greater in this world than him/her, and to nurture a respect for that inescapable fact of life. We are now reaping the harvest from the seeds we visited upon this earth.

Those “qualities” have now been incorporated into the institutions we look to for guidance, inspiration and enforcement of what makes a society civilized and orderly, with a sense of community that will serve the needs of us all. They see any sense of charity, sharing, giving and help as a sign of weakness; the complete antithesis of the now much revered sense of personal entitlement firmly rooted in and having only to do with “me.”

We are reaping the results of that failure on our part by the avariciousness and sense of privilege by the oligarchs, plutocrats, international corporations, financial institutions, political parties, elected officials, public servants and the vast number of minions who are all too eager to cater to their every twisted and perverted whim, hoping they will throw us a crumb from all they have taken from those of lesser means. Those are what they have created in order to profit from our self-interests and insatiable appetites for “more”. They have the means and the help of some of the most sinister creativity imaginable in order to determine our appetites and what it takes to satisfy those appetites, so they can, in turn, create and grow the vast fortunes that permit them to feed upon what little of our treasure may be left after their plunder. We, in turn, have dutifully become totally conformist and complacent, thereby ensuring the growth and profitability of the markets they have created from their vast wealth. We are now the willing and ever compliant serfs. They own and control us. They know it and we sense it. But, when, if ever, are we going to rise up and insist on something better? I do not see that as very likely in the foreseeable future.

There a couple of old clichés that come to mind. One is that “birds of a feather flock together,” and “you shall be known by the company you keep.” Those of great wealth and power keep their exalted positions because they know the validity of those words and they are masters at practicing them. They “keep the backs” of each other so those on the bottom of the socio-economic-political ladder will not rise up and overtake them.

• The Bush Family has a well-established history of associations with some of the most unsavory and unprincipled scions known to the business and political worlds. That tradition has not been lost on George W. Bush and those who served as his enablers during his terms as President. Scratch the surface and you will find a tainted history that vastly improved their economic well-being.

• Are you aware that a close personal relationship has evolved between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton since each left the White House? Yet, on Clinton’s first Inauguration Day, President and Mrs. Bush hardly spoke to the Clintons. What changed that transformed them into golfing partners and bosom buddies?

• Are you aware that Bill and Hillary Clinton, ostensibly, left the White House paupers at the end of his Presidency? Are you aware that, as of today, Bill Clinton is reputed to be worth 200 million dollars, and Hillary is rumored to have a fortune worth 34.9 million dollars?

• Are you aware that Bill Clinton, as President, was the great enabler for Phil Gramm, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and a host of others of dubious stature that enabled them to totally dismantle all of the financial safeguards (Glass-Steagall among them) that comprised the bulwark that was keeping those institutions viable and secure for the people of the United States?

• Are you aware of their role in the de-regulation of the financial institutions spawned the financial collapse of 2007 – 2008?

• Are you aware that Chelsea Clinton is reputed to have been, during and after the financial collapse, a hedge fund manager on Wall Street?

• Are you aware that most of the key players in Bill Clinton’s administration were quietly and rather surreptitiously imported into the Obama administration shortly after President Obama assumed office? What, if any, benefit accrued to the electorate because of that thread of continuity, or were there sinister motives that served a darker purpose?

• Are you aware that Barack Obama has done an about-face on every major campaign promise he made that was supposed to accrue to the benefit of the American people who put him in office, and the working Americans to whom he promised so much?

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