sad and frustrated

I have started this blog because I am sad and frustrated with a little bit of fear in their for added spice, and I hope writing this will help ease my mind.

But first let me tell you about myself so you may understand where I am coming from. I was born in New York City just after JFK was elected president in 1960, which makes me a late boomer or an early gen X'er depending on which egghead you read. My mother married a man I never got a long with who moved us to Rochester NY. I remember hearing the Beatles on my mom's radio, seeing a Gemini Launch on tv watching the first moon landing with the joy only an eight year old boy and the young at heart can have. But I also watched my step uncle go to Viet Nam and come back with a changed and some what scary look in his eye, hearing about MLK being shot and watching the news brake into a forgotten tv show to say that RFK was dead. I watched my mothers second marriage's ugly brake up where I and my brothers became targets and later all be forgotten and left pretty much left to our own devices. I had a hippy baby sitter that wore tube tops and shorts or see through sun dresses, and she taught me all the anti war songs of the day. I would years later realize that the strange feeling I had for her was lust.

So of course with all that went before in November of 68, a few weeks before my 8^th birthday I became a Nixon supporter and a republican. Now before you surf off to some porn or start writing the flame you are going to send me read some more. Becoming a republican made sense to me, by this time my mother was a mess my evil step father was off doing what low level evil asses do. I was left to watch over my bother and learn right and wrong from tv and comic books. So when my third grade teacher, another early sex object in my life, had a straw poll on the election with us choosing a candidate to support and having to give a reason to the class Nixon seemed the one to go with. He said he would win the war and to a seven year old with the only positive roll models in his life being old war movies and batman comic books winning the war made sense. Also my natural contrariness with everyone around me being anti war and/or anti Nixon made me go that way.

This is getting way to long so I will cut to the chase, I stayed a republican to this day even tho I have felt that the party has left me back in the early nineties the democratic party has always seemed to be to screwed up and less than help full to this country in the last 30 years or so for me to support it. Now that is not to say I vote always for the republicans I vote for who I think would do the best or sometimes the lest harm. And this finally brings me to why I feel sad and frustrated and a little scared.

I believe this country is getting ready to tear it self apart and I see almost no way of stopping it!

Now some of you may think I am being overly dramatic or some black helicopter seeing wing nut, but please hear me out. For the most part both major political parties have sold their souls to the corporate political complex by this I mean that they both care more for their own power and the money that comes from doing the bidding of the large corporations than solving the many problems we face today. Both parties say and do things that feed into the worst natures of the radical factions in their parties while they happily cut back room deals that cause the dollar to drop, jobs to go over seas and corporations profits to shoot upward while leaving the masses in a downward spiral to oblivion. They have convinced the rank and file of each party that the perfect is the enemy of the good and will not take a middle stand to get bills passed and problems solved the correct way. And to add to the dysfunction the boomer politicians keep re fighting the culture wars of the sixties with out seeing or caring that the country has moved on and needs them to work together to right the ship of state. The old guard in the democratic party are fighting tooth and nail to keep Obama out and change the old dynamic, the republicans have long ago lost what the party once stood for and have become a weird mix of free trade at all costs and religious zealots.

Being a history buff I see the parallels between what is happening today and what happened to that other great republic that we patterned our own after. The factional fighting for power is what killed the Roman republic and set the stage for Caesar to march in and save the day. Before Caesar grabbed for power their was a 100 years of civil war and chaos in Rome, is this where we are headed for. I fear it is so.

This year's election may be the fork in the road, one way goes to a bright future one goes to an America I may not want to live in. I feel that if ether McCain or Clinton is elected we will be in for some rough times ahead that may lead to if not civil war to a tearing of ties between states and regions. Obama may be the answer but what if he tried to pull us out of Iraq the wrong way and the Army rebels what do we do then. The Army did not want this war in the first place and now that we are in it and they are ordered to do something that will cost more lives than staying in would I do not know what they would do.

I will leave it their for now.