Can't We All Just Get Along?

It's tough watching the news these days. Everyone's so mad at each other, nobody is getting along. It's a travesty. I think that what the pundits are doing is treason. Undercutting our country, causing dissension, bringing fear to our living rooms is treason, in my humble opinion. We used to have two parties, and that was bad enough. Now we have multiple parties, the Tea Party, the GOP, DEMS, Green, Independent....we just keep fractioning off and pretty soon we won't be speaking to each other at all.

When did we become such haters? Are these the same people that had flowers in their hair in Haight Ashbury back in the sixties? I think it is. This is the flower power generation, the Summer of Love generation. This is the generation of brotherly love, the age of Aquarius and everyday people. Is this what all those drugs back in the 60s did to us? Maybe we shouldn't have stopped taking them. How did a generation of people who worked so closely to organize anti-war efforts and marched against the Viet Nam war and heard the I Have A Dream speech in an age when there was no Internet get so angry? Why are we fighting with each other?

Can you imagine a country where everyone gets along, where everything is working, and we are all looking out for each other? What must it be like to live in a country like, oh, I don't know, Switzerland or Norway or Denmark where things run smoothly and there's enough for everyone and the government has to work on lofty goals like keeping the arts alive instead of whether a rape victim is allowed to get an abortion and if so, who pays for it? Our country used to be amazing.

It's amazing that less than a hundred years ago, black people couldn't sit at the lunch counter, and now we have a black president. It's amazing that we stood together as one voice on September 11. It's amazing that America is only 200 years old and still working things out, yet we respect and celebrate the diversity of our nation. Why can't we see that?

We are no longer the best country in the world. We aren't even in the top ten anymore. Our kids are failing at everything, our military is all but defeated by a country so small most people can't find it on a map. The United States of America is a wholely-owned subsidiary of the People's Republic of China.

The Today Show has been doing a segment on the death of civility over the past week. Civility is dead. When I see our president being portrayed as a clown, as Hitler, and being called such vicious names, I want to lay down and die, but not for this country. I wouldn't lay down and die for a country that disrespects the office of the president so very much. You have every right to say you don't like him, his politics, his name. But he is still our president, and anyone with any class at all knows you don't talk about the president in those terms. I hated Bush but I respected him as my president. He was a terrible president, but he was a president.

Yes, civility is dead. We can't all just get along. It's too late for that.