“She was six,” Rose said. “A little girl, innocent, happy, born to wealthy parents who seemed so normal. She went to school in Bayside, in the best school district in New York City, which is why her parents didn’t immediately send her off to private school. They lived in Bayside Manor with their own boat dock on the bay.
“She was a good student. She got up and dressed herself every day, got herself ready for school, sat quietly and ate breakfast prepared by the housekeeper. Evelyn wasn’t a nanny although she served in that capacity when the girl’s mother was exceptionally busy with her work. Mommy was a socialite who did an extraordinary amount of charity work. That work kept her happy and busy and the girl would grow up to do the same, but not before becoming a stunning young lady, a debutante brought out at the debutante’s ball.
“Every day the girl came home from school and did the little homework a first-grader had and then she ate a snack. After the snack either her mother or Evelyn would take her out to her playground to play.
“ ‘One day you’ll have little brothers and sisters to play with,’ the girl’s mother had been saying for awhile. Then, one day the little girl saw the bulge, very small at first, but she knew her mother was pregnant and understood that her words about brothers and sisters had been designed to prepare her for the day that was coming.”
Rose poured coffee for herself and after returning the coffee pot to the kitchen she sat down to drink it. Today she was wearing a simple cotton dress and sandals and Murph could see she had not put on any makeup. “I’m going to show you my panties in a few moments, so don’t be shocked. And I’m going to ask you to touch me. Don’t get scared. It’s not sexual.”
Murph didn’t say anything. He was thinking about what Rose had told him so far—nothing much of anything—but he sensed where it was going though of course he had nothing but a gut feeling.
Look for Rose’s Story on Amazon Kindle this week.
They didn’t run behind. No matter what you thought about him, Drenovis was an ace at expediting and he called the orders efficiently. Mr. Jim made it clear to Bill and Henry Lee that he didn’t want Drenovis to have any chance to say anything negative or critical, so they made sure to be swift and accurate. All plates were released only when they’d satisfied Mr. Jim’s aesthetics.
At the lunch table they all had choice words for the disliked manager. Mary recalled how he’d hit on her. She laughed it off, said he was one ugly cracker. “Now you,” she said to Bill, “you’re one cute white boy.”
They all had a few good laughs. Drenovis could see them and hear them and the harder they laughed the more irked he was. When he’d had enough such that he felt he was gonna blow his temper, he called Lexi into the office. He gave her a dressing down for being inebriated on the job and offered her a choice, not a good one, not one with any good alternative for her.
Mr. Jim had just gone out the back door. Henry Lee and Bill were standing in the hall. Lexi, in tears, ran through the kitchen and out to them. She threw herself down on the lettuce cases and wept.
Mary and Bea came out. Seeing Lexi run through the kitchen, they already knew what happened. Mary put her arms around Lexi and stroked her back.
“It was give him a you-know-what or get fired. So I guess I’m through.”
“Shit,” Henry Lee said, drawing out the word to “shee-it.”
“You done right, girl,” Mary said. She continued stroking Lexi’s back.
“What you think?” Bea asked Mary.
“I think we need to stick up for her.”
“Me too,” Bea said.
“You ain’t hitting that today,” Henry Lee said to Bill.
“Guess not,” Bill said. “Maybe not ever.”
Even distraught as she was, Lexi heard that interchange. She looked up at Bill then down to her feet. “I don’t mean to cause any trouble,” she said.
“He’s mad with us,” said Mary. “We gave him a hard time all through lunch. And so you know, I didn’t give him no favors either. But lots of the waitresses do.”
“I’d rather work in a fast food joint flipping burgers. The hell with him.”
“Wait around till Tommy gets back. Me and Bea’ll see what we can do. Take her with you in the meat room,” Mary said to Henry Lee.
Downstairs, Lexi sat on the stainless steel counter while Bill and Henry Lee cut meat. Drenovis came in once to see what they were doing. Seeing Lexi there, he turned red and told her to get her things and get out. Bill took this one on. He stepped between her and Drenovis and told Drenovis she was staying to see Tommy. Then, most uncharacteristically, he told Drenovis to cart his funky ass out of the meat room.
“I’m gonna fire you too,” Drenovis said.
“Go for it,” Bill said. He looked Drenovis straight in the eyes. “I know six other places give me a job and more money too. I’ll take a few days off and be working next week.”
“You’re getting too big for your britches,” Drenovis said.
“You’re the one out of line,” Bill said. He picked up the sharpening steel and his curved butcher’s knife, honed the blade’s edge on the steel. “Go on out of here before you get yourself in a situation you don’t want to be in.”
“This isn’t over,” Drenovis said.
“I suppose not. No matter. We’ll finish it.”
“You watch your step.”
“You watch yours,” said Bill.
Coming This Week:
The Ghost Writer, Rose’s Story: A Look At The Worlds We Hide
I generally stay away from using first person. It’s a tricky form overall. It very often leads to lies, certainly to overstatement, and it woos users of it into bragging and overestimating themselves. For example, we have that “master politician” Nancy Pelosi. Need I say more?
First person, if one isn’t the bragging type, can lead to self-flagellation or public apology, and that’s a tough one too.
In one of the high-level lit courses I took in graduate school, I remember once being told that writers were notorious liars. That seemed about right to me since that’s what they do for a living, or at least what fiction writers do anyway. I think our politicians do it these days too, and certainly our would-be journalists are busy at it as I write this. Too bad so many people believe their lies as truths, believe our politicians’ lies as truths too.
So here we are. I generally don’t talk about myself per se. As it is, most people don’t know too much about themselves anyway. They have their notions and ideas about themselves, but it’s difficult to get a full and clear perspective of oneself. I know for a fact that since I was about fifteen all I ever wanted to do was write. After that, things get cloudy.
I believe I’ve mostly been strongly opinionated. I believe when I was younger I thought I knew better than my father, but as I’ve grown older, I’m sure now I’m not sure and probably didn’t. I know I was much more liberal back when I was younger, and I was sure those Beatles’ songs were right, you know, Imagine and All You Need Is Love. I think I really would like to be in an Octopus’ Garden. (Yes, I know Imagine is John Lennon’s.)
I’m in my late sixties now and I see all these young, pretty people all over the place giving opinions and leading things as if they actually know what they’re talking about, as if they know what they’re doing. But here’s a little secret. They don’t! The young ones lack perspective and context and the liberals who empower them only do it for their own self-serving purposes. In part, that explains the current state of our inner cities, our education system, and our national debt.
So I look back at my father’s perspective. His parents were legal immigrants. He spoke three languages. He lived through The Depression. He fought in World War II and spent three and a half years as a POW in Nazi Germany, in Stalag III B Furstenberg. He was a working-class stiff who worked all his life, a Jimmy Hoffa Teamster when Labor Unions were relevant and not self-serving political animals. The Government did not give him a disability and denied that his rheumatic heart was related to his war/POW experience.
He had it pretty rough.
Compared to our lives today, he had it really rough. Still, he maintained certain beliefs. He believed in America, in right or wrong, my country. He believed in hard work and in education. He scoffed at stupidity. The idea of hugging and coddling an enemy that would kill you without hesitation was anathema to him. He believed one should work for what he gets; he didn’t believe in freebies. He believed in helping people who needed help but not in entertaining or supporting scammers. He did not believe in a welfare state. He believed in marriage between a man and a woman, in two genders, not thirty-two. He believed in God up until his war experiences, then I think he doubted but believed his children should be brought up with God, with Judaism, and with his and their heritage.
That’s not all his beliefs, but it’s a good sense of them. He warned that our liberal government was crazy, that it was ruining our country by destroying work ethic and supporting freeloaders. He feared that being soft on enemies would destroy us. He understood a budget and the consequences of not living within your means.
My father’s beliefs were simple and straightforward. Sometimes, more often now, I think we should revisit some of them and consider that from his and many people’s perspectives we’ve gone way astray and should head back to simpler, more concrete approaches to our modern times. All that liberal, intellectual, smarter-than-thou, I-know-better hogwash is just that, hogwash.
Social Darwinism! Murph had written about Social Darwinism not too long ago saying that Social Security, Medicare and all the social welfare programs, programs like Food Stamps, ADC, TANF, WIC, and especially the protective agencies like CPS, were begun with the best of intentions, the true desire to help the ill, the helpless and the needy. But their intentions and desires were perverted over time, superseded by the need to survive, the first premise of evolution. At the precise moment this occurred, these programs started becoming detrimental to their clientele, to society and to the taxpayers who ultimately funded them. The reason: Social Darwinism, in this case, agency evolution, the survival of the fittest agencies through funding, funding because money was the agencies’ representative manifestation of strength and power.
Murph had written that Child Protective Services (CPS) perfectly demonstrated this evolution. The goal of CPS should only be assisting its clientele in accordance with the purpose for the organization. But its evolution suggested that its primary goal had become its own survival. It justified its existence by keeping a healthy number of kids in its control, thus maintaining funding (and quite neatly, he thought) somewhat like an agent or even a record company does, by collecting commissions and royalties on each property handled.
Goddamn, he thought. He sat back in his desk chair and sipped his coffee. DFCS and all the CPS agencies have made caring for kids a byproduct. What they do is shuffle them around like chattel and collect royalties on them, all by maintaining the number of kids with the revolving door.
His friend, a lawyer, had fought DYFS in Jersey and he’d dealt with ACS in New York while at the BOE. DYFS was like every other bureaucracy and government agency, city, state or the big boy Federal, just like the BOE in New York where he worked for a quarter century. Most of the on-the-line workers, the combat troops as he liked to think of them, were just normal, regular people who wanted to do good, to do their jobs well and help the people they were supposed to help. Then there were the ones who were lazy and didn’t do much but collect the paycheck, the not-so-competent ones who tried but didn’t get much done, and finally the jaded, corrupt ones, the ones involved in what Rose Friedlander was alluding to in regard to what both her husband and her father had been involved in, in asking Murph to look into that Georgia Senator circa 2010 who had done a report on the corruption and child trafficking in the Georgia CPS system.
That Senator was killed, Murph thought, and then he thought if you believed otherwise, that she was the victim in a murder-suicide by her distraught husband, then you believed the check was in the mail and you believed that the protesters started the riots at the demonstration where he was arrested eons ago. Not. Sergeant Hopkins, the cop who arrested him, was just one of the jaded corrupt following the orders of the FBI, who actually started the riots, who was following the orders of President Nixon. No one wants to believe these things, Murph thought, the clandestine conspiracies our fiction and cinematography are saturated by, yet we all believe them on some level and stay quiet because… because of suppression, because the suppression is much more diabolical in the United States, Murph thought, because here they maintain the illusion of freedom and democracy. They don’t’ kill you, he thought. They kill your life.
Look for Rose’s Story on Amazon Kindle this week.
Sometimes you have to let your fingers do the walking. Maybe many people won’t get the reference to the Yellow Pages since it is a relatively older reference and perhaps obscure these days. I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to use the term Yellow Pages because who knows what the PC Police will do these days.
I came across this article by Dennis Prager and am posting the link so it can easily be viewed in full.
How The Mainstream Media Operates
The thrust of the article is that the Mainstream Media distorts the truth. Prager begins with a quote:
“Our leading media” are characterized by “indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly.” (Patrick Lawrence in The Nation, Aug. 9, 2017, on the media’s reporting of the alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia)
Then he goes on:
“To understand America’s crises today, one must first understand what has happened to two institutions: the university and the news media. They do not regard their mission as educating and informing but indoctrinating…
“When it comes to straight news stories–say, an earthquake in Central America — the news media often do their job responsibly. But when a story has a left-wing interest, the media abandon straight news reporting and take on the role of advocates…”
Prager relates the story of what happened to him, personally, and uses his experience to present his four lessons:
Lesson No. 1: When the mainstream media write or say that a conservative “suggested” something that sounds outrageous, it usually means the conservative never actually said it.
Lesson No. 2: When used by the mainstream media, the words “divisive” or “contentious” simply mean “leftists disagree with.”
Lesson No. 3: Contrary evidence is omitted.
Lesson No. 4: Subjects are covered in line with left-wing ideology.
We hear about this all the time now. President Trump calls it fake news and only the die-hard left themselves believe that the mainstream media is not biased. Or they believe it is biased but since it is biased and distorted in their favor and in favor of their cause, it’s basically okay.
Prager shows how the mainstream media distort the truth, how they literally break the rules of responsible reporting and also break the fundamental rules of basic research.
Then he shows how once the mainstream media have presented something, even though it is not the truth and is demonstrated not to be the truth, they continue to quote what they have presented as if it is the truth, further distorting the reality, further confuscating the facts, further advancing a narrative that is simply not true.
Regarding his own case, what the media did to him, he says:
“In summary, all mainstream media coverage of this one story was tainted, biased, often false and predicated solely on left-wing presumptions. Magnify what they did to me a thousand-fold and you will begin to understand media behavior over the last two generations, and especially behavior today, when hysteria and advocacy have completely replaced news reporting.”
A distorting and manipulating mainstream media whose goal is to “indoctrinate rather than educate,” as Prager says, is dangerous. It is anathema to notion of a free press that was created to be unbiased. Worse, it attacks the very foundations upon which America was established. Particularly and specifically these days, it attacks one of the underlying principal of our democracy which is the peaceful transition of power.
Coming This Week:
The Ghost Writer, Rose’s Story: A Look At The Worlds We Hide
So who killed you, Jack? One of them? Murph wondered.
Murph wondered what was hiding in the shadows. The worlds we don’t see, he said to himself, like who killed Kennedy and why Jack Ruby so easily killed Lee Harvey Oswald and then was himself so conveniently hushed up, like the realities of human trafficking.
In 2015, 11,800 runaways were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Of them, it was estimated that a fourth, or 2900, were likely sex trafficking victims. Seventy-four percent of that fourth, or 2146 children, were in foster care when they went missing. So, Murph thought, was it one of them who killed you, Jack? One of their parents? One of their handlers?
Maybe one of them, he thought, thinking that Jack and his friends took those trips down south for the trysts supplied by CPS workers. Murph knew that up to 75% of kids in foster care were sexually abused, that the rate of sexual abuse within the foster care system was more than four times as high as in the general population. In group homes, the rate of sexual abuse was more than 28 times that of the general population. A CPS worker or hired killer to protect a CPS worker from being found out? A parent of one of the foster kids? Rose had a CD. Who else had one?
Yeah, Murph thought: the worlds we don’t see. He told himself again that the Georgia Senator and her husband were murdered. She was just weeks from exposing the human trafficking and sexual exploitation within DFCS. Coincidences like that weren’t usually coincidence. Politicians lie. Agencies lie and protect themselves. You can’t fight human trafficking with a sign saying # bring the girls back.
Look for Rose’s Story on Amazon Kindle this week.
It’s a good bet that if one begins a piece of research with a preconceived opinion and explicit bent one can find proof for that opinion or bent. So, if you wanted to prove that President Trump is a racist, you could pore over everything he’s said for which there is video or audio or actual print quotations, cite only that which might be construed as racist, disregard anything that would ameliorate or counterbalance your selections, and voila, you would have research, which could be verified, that he’s a racist.
Not quite. Not exactly. Not even close. But as per the insanity of today’s print standards, it would be cited as valid research by all the media outlets whose one goal is to undermine President Trump and de-legitimize his presidency.
Just to put it out there, because it’s the right thing to do, The Washington Post, same paper Mark Levin and others call The Washington Compost, hired some twenty or so reporters just to get dirt on Trump. There’s a giant likelihood that their reporting is skewed, slanted, biased. Now the dirt-finders are responsible for verifying their stories but their job is dirt, not whether the dirt is real or true. Furthermore, their salaries (and success) depend upon their finding dirt, not upon their finding truth.
Overall, looking at the mainstream media outlets that have presented about ninety percent negative stories on President Trump, there’s a good bet they have an ulterior motive, a slant, a bias, a direction they are purposefully heading in. A look at their owners provides clear validation of this point and indicates that the media and our news are now driven by personal interests and political bent rather than the quest for truth.
This continual attack on the President is unprecedented. It’s unheard-of. On some levels it strikes at the very core of our democracy, at the very core of the basis of our government which is the peaceful transition of power. It’s where no man has gone before in our society. In terms of who and what we are and what we say we stand for, it’s pure insanity for the mainstream media to rock the foundation of our country because they don’t like the president who was elected.
We’ve really gone off the deep end.
Also just to put it out there, the previous president was, for the most part, given a free ride by the press and social media for eight years. He bitched and moaned about the one outlet that did criticize him but the rest of the mainstream media thought that he was cute. He hung out in a racist church and listened to a racist pastor for some twenty years. He started his political campaign in the home of a domestic terrorist. Yet he was literally given a pass for this and oh so much more.
The politicization of the media is dangerous and diabolical. It threatens our country, our Constitution and our very democratic existence. It is insane for the American people to allow it to go unopposed, to not fact-check it and call it out for what it is. It is insane for us to dance with the real possibility of destroying the underlying foundations of the greatest country around merely for personal political interests.
In the fifties, they used to say “I’d rather be dead than red” meaning it was better to blow up the world with nuclear bombs than allow the U.S. to become communist. This was a statement of human arrogance and pure hubris. We used to think we were the only planet with life forms and by extension that humans were the superior life form of all. That was more human arrogance and hubris.
To act as the media are, by political beliefs rather than quest for truth, and thereby risk eroding the very foundation of our country, is the same pure human arrogance and hubris. It is actually beyond pure insanity.
Let our media go to any communist country they so readily espouse or to any totalitarian one and do there what they are doing here. Let them see how long they would survive.
Coming This Week:
The Ghost Writer, Rose’s Story: A Look At The Worlds We Hide
Eventually, of course, everyone had to and did speak to Drenovis. But it was Mr. Jim who put the words to the kitchen help’s disdain for the unwanted manager.
Drenovis had asked why everyone was so quiet. No one actually replied to that. Then Drenovis asked why everyone was so glum.
Mr. Jim stepped to where the only thing that separated him from Drenovis was the counter between them. “Cause no one likes your fat, nasty ass,” he said, his eyes directly peering into Drenovis’.
Henry Lee guffawed. Bill looked on. Mary came around from the back to see what was happening.
Mr. Jim had nothing to lose. He was already retired, living on Social Security and his railroad pension. He worked off the books, for cash, part time. He didn’t need the job or the money.
Drenovis knew this. Drenovis knew he had no recourse but to eat Mr. Jim’s words, which he did. But Lexi had the misfortune to enter the kitchen just after Mr. Jim spoke. Drenovis attacked her when she handed him all her orders at once.
“Don’t stack them next time. Turn them in as you get them.”
“I did.” Lexi was taken aback.
“You been drinking?” Drenovis asked. He could smell the alcohol on her breath.
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I had a beer before I came in.”
“Leave the girl alone,” Mr. Jim said.
“Stay out of my business.” Drenovis went back at Mr. Jim.
“You better watch your mouth. No one here likes you. No one here wants to work with you.”
“Go home then,” Drenovis said, but he knew it was a mistake as soon as the words left his mouth because Mr. Jim began untying his apron.
“I gotta go to the bathroom really bad,” Henry Lee said.
“I just ran out of fries,” Bill said, “and we got three orders I need to put up. I need to get a case from downstairs.”
“All right,” Drenovis said. “Let’s just forget I said that.”
“Leave the little girl alone,” Mr. Jim repeated. “In fact, you ought to apologize to her.”
Lexi, who had not been dismissed, who was slightly drunk and extremely innocent as a new waitress, just stood there.
Drenovis didn’t say anything. But then he asked her her name. He took the orders in his hand and attempted to call them.
“I need to pick up first,” Henry Lee said.
“Go on back to your tables,” Mr. Jim told Lexi. She looked at Bill and Bill nodded for her to do what Mr. Jim said.
“Goddammit,” Drenovis said.
“Go on and order,” Mr. Jim said.
Mary came over to Bill on the line. “You got everything you need?” she asked.
“Sure.”
Mary smiled at Bill and walked over to Mr. Jim. She stood by him, stood looking over to Drenovis. Drenovis knew the kitchen’s solidarity was stronger than he was, stronger than anything he could do. He knew he didn’t have to worry about his job because he was the general manager for both stores and Mr. Bowman would not fire him. But he knew he had to keep it so the kitchen help worked for him. He knew the kitchen help was loyal to Robert alone, and Robert was Mr. Bowman’s numbers runner and his boyfriend too.
“Ordering a Top medium-rare and two bleus. Ordering two pickerel, one with a baked and the other with mashed. And don’t think cause you can do the job now you’re safe here,” he added, looking directly at Bill. “Ordering a Super bloody and two roast beef dinners. Ordering three burgers medium. That’s all what the girl had stacked and I’m firing her ass so say good-bye to whoever she is.”
Mr. Jim walked past Mary and over to Bill. He put his arm around Bill. “Boy,” he said, “you pay that fool no mind. Your job is safe, and you are safe, no matter what he says or thinks. And that’s just the way it is.”
“Let me pick up,” Drenovis said. “We’re gonna start to run behind.”
“Now ain’t that a shame,” said Mr. Jim defiantly.
Coming Next Week:
The Ghost Writer, Rose’s Story: A Look At The Worlds We Hide
M
urph’s overwhelming instinct was to start the story with the double murder of the Georgia Senator and her husband some seven years ago, the double murder Rose had told Murph to look up at one of their first meetings. It was ruled a murder-suicide, dismissed as a financially distraught husband who could simply bear it no more, whatever the it was. The police and FBI never did a murder investigation, never looked into the fact that such an investigation would likely lead to high-powered, high-positioned politicians and State DFCS workers who were involved in the kidnapping and selling of children.
There was a cover-up going on. Kidnapping kids and placing them in foster care where they were literally for sale, and consequently sold—that was what it was about. The Senator’s murder, the double murder of her and her husband (of course since there was no murder investigation it could never be called a murder) was swept under the rug and anyone who disagreed with the murder-suicide findings was called a conspiracy-theory hack. The Senator’s death occurring just a few weeks before she was to present a new report on the corruption within DFCS, a report specifically detailing DFCS kidnapping and trafficking kids then selling them as sex slaves and/or forcing them into prostitution, was never even considered suspiciously coincidental. How strange!
It was so clear to Murph and a whole lot of people, as clearly non-coincidental as Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. To Murph, it was as clear as the FBI starting the riot he was arrested in. That was clear because he’d seen it with his own eyes, personally witnessed it and been a victim of it. Oorah.
Initially, the Senator criticized The Adoption and Safe Families Act passed during the Clinton Presidency for the trouble with DFCS. This act provided financial payouts to state and local agencies that increased the number of children being adopted out of Foster Care. It was like a royalty system, a pay-per-head scheme which she claimed caused Georgia state and local officials to flood the Foster Care System with kids that did not belong there so they could get their hands on the Federal monies.
The Senator’s initial criticism and her subsequent finding of the “flooding” of the system led her to publish a report about the “corrupt child protective services in her state,” a report which detailed her ongoing investigation of CPS, a report in which she chronicled witnessing firsthand the ruthless behavior from caseworkers, social workers, investigators, lawyers, judges and therapists. Essentially, the report outlined their collusion and pretty much damned the entire system.
Having produced this report, the Senator was beginning to lose favor with the press and beginning to be marginalized by her peers. What she was looking into was extremely volatile and dangerous because it threatened to expose high-level officials. Nevertheless, the more she uncovered, the deeper she went with her investigations and the further she expanded her scope, even encompassing areas outside Georgia’s borders and into surrounding states.
The Senator had her supporters, ardent supporters who encouraged her to go on. Her going on led her to believe there was a direct link between elite-level child pornography and child sex trafficking and gross misconduct within Child Protective Services (CPS).
Hence she was murdered, but not immediately. First she was politically murdered. She lost reelection a year after publishing her first report and claimed the loss was due to the report, her beliefs and her refusal to cease her investigations. She was about to present the new report which named names and provided details of her suspicions regarding the illicit link between CPS and child trafficking when she was killed, when the alleged murder-suicide took place.
Look for Rose’s Story on Amazon Kindle next week.
Well, if there’s anything you’d like broken, give it to the government to run. Time and time again our government has shown that it can’t manage anything efficiently. It can’t run anything efficiently. Almost everything it takes over it breaks.
Our illustrious leaders, specifically our Congressmen and Senators, now with a staggering ten percent approval rating, are themselves broken. They’re a despicable bunch, left and right. Most of them are crooks, thieves and bigots, not to mention unabashed hypocrites. And it’s nothing new, just more pronounced than in years past due to cable TV, twenty-four/seven coverage and videotape.
Most of them nowadays are millionaires. That’s a somewhat new phenomenon, them being a millionaire’s club. As such, and given their collective character, they are the same as the old Soviet Politburo. My how we’ve regressed! They are often referred to here as the American Politburo. If you lived through the cold war, you know how we regarded that group. Our group is no less despicable, no less self-centered and power-oriented.
You might say that recently our group above has pretty much broken the government. They inherited a top-of-the-line, world-envied Cadillac of a government and they’ve driven it into the ground. In times past, even though the sides didn’t agree, they worked together for the benefit of the country. But now there’s no pretense of getting along. Neither side works with the other and both sides, with this new president, are working against the Executive Branch. This was previously unheard of.
While it would be easy to assign blame and to pick a side, regarding the current dysfunction of the current Congress and the animus it holds toward the President, choosing sides isn’t even worthwhile. Rather, it’s plain for everyone to see that the government itself is broken. The Judicial Branch now rules according to supposed intent and spoken word rather than upon whether actions are legal and/or constitutional. The Legislative Branch is ridiculous beyond ridiculousness, overtly self-serving and corrupt. The turnaround (The Turnaround) is in full play—those accusing others of crimes are themselves more guilty than those they accuse. And so it goes.
Education: broken.
Medicare: broken.
VA: broken.
Social Security: broken.
Inner cities: broken.
IRS: broken.
Justice department: broken.
In all above, funds that were supposed to be dedicated funds have been misappropriated or departments meant to be apolitical have become political tools. Again, it would be easy to name names and point fingers, but again to no avail here since the deeds are done.
And so in the government’s broken state it attempts to divert attention from itself by casting aspersions in all directions, by name calling and finger pointing. Our leaders aren’t even particularly good in their rhetoric. They’re just on-the-air enough to make it sound as if they are. In fact, they spend more time perfecting their rhetoric than they do doing their jobs.
We were supposed to have a government of the people, for the people and by the people. Our politicians were supposed to be part-time and serve only for a short time. But our greedy, power-hungry leaders have created the career politician, those legislators whose only purpose is to win reelection repeatedly. They are a perverted bunch who have perverted our government.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were the only world power. We threw that away with our corruption and stupidity. As it looks now, if we’re not careful, our corruption and stupidity coupled with our selfishness and greed will cause us to throw away our country.
The one thing our government is really good at is how to break it, no matter what the it is. Wanna break something? Give it to the government to run.
Coming Next Week:
The Ghost Writer, Rose’s Story: A Look At The Worlds We Hide
