Our Stolen Years

In the year 2000, The United States had a presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. With the never ever clear outcome of the election, George Bush ascended into the presidency with half the country believing that he had stolen the election. In 2004, in the race between Bush and Kerry, again a razor thin margin that was decided only by an unguarded, insecure, hackable electronic voting system in a state that was controlled by Republican electorial officials.

You might say that was the beginning of a crime spree. We were robbed and the robbery continued. We had our sense of a secure democracy stolen from us.

Maybe most important, we had our sense of our own morality stolen from us. Sure, in spite of what we would like to believe about ourselves, America was a false front of morality. We meddled in the affairs of other goverments and selfishly promoted ourt own economic interests by supporting dictators, but usually in secret.
When this adminsitration overthrew the Geneva Convention and endorsed torture as a national policy, we crossed a line on the moral compass. The need for conventional morality was derided by the president and those in power as a matter of policy.

We had our faith in the rule of law, the notion that the Constitution, our founding document, contained principles which must be adhered to. The very existence of Guantanamo, it's lawlessness and barbarism became a Kafkaesque nightmare where a suspect could disappear for years with out a trial or even being allowed to know what he was specifically charged with. With this, our judicial system was robbed of any right to say they were any different than the Star Chamber of the English Monarchs.

In tthe 1970's we learned about the goverment surveilance of artists, ciivil rights, feminist and anti war activists. There was an outcry and Congress responded by restricting domestic spying on American citizens. With the Bush Adminisration's warrantless surveillance program, our basic right to not be spied on was stolen by our goverment.

With the suppression of any real discussion of climate change, trying to treat it as if it was an imaginary hoax, the thwarting of stem cell research and the FDA's negligence in strictly testing products, we were robbed of 8 years of cutting edge research on environmental and medical challenges and the real emergencies that face us.

What Bush wanted most, it would seem was to steal the idea that goverment could help or support its citizens. The aftermath of Katrina brought this home with images of people stranded on roofs, people stuffed into the convention center and left to rot. This reinforced the notions of the priveleged that they did not have to contribute to the Common Good. Our sense of being connected, having a common interest to which we should all contribute was stolen.

Other presidents have lied to us...Nixon and the bombing of Cambodia, Reagan and Iran-Contra, Clinton and Lewinsky....none have ever conducted such a full head on cynical soviet style propaganda campaign against its own people as George "WMD" and "Mission Accomplished" Bush.
Much of this propaganda was aimed at women. While Laura Bush went to Afghanistan to show her concern for womens oppression, her husband was busily closing the White House's office for Womens Initiatives and Outreach, removing info about issues like pay equity and childcare from the Labor Department's website and posting bogus claims about the "link" between abortions and breast cancer on the National Cancer Center Website.

Now at the end of his term, we are stuck holding the bag as his policy of ignoring the reality of a corrupt financial market system comes home to roost. The very sense of who we are and what we could become as a nation has been stolen from us.
This time in our history shall always be remebered as Our Stolen Years.