I am scared for my family, for my nation. People are celebrating and calling this a "historic election." Why is it when they say it, I see it as the election christened by historians as the 'beginning of the end?' That the celebrating screaming masses will later be looked at with derision much like the band which continued to play as the Titanic sank?
My husband is military so I should be happy Obama is president right? He and his congress will raise the white flag and let our troops come home. Sure, some of them will be pushed out of the service and into unemployment during a bad economy, but hey, who cares, right? They were never really important anyway. After all, Obama and his congress voted to cut off funding right in the middle of the war. Imagine reaching for a magazine to reload during a fire fight and instead finding a politician there shrugging his shoulders....'sorry man, I got lazy people at home to support.'
Yeah, Obama is a knife in a gun fight kind of guy.
On the surface it looks like his cowardice will benefit my family...my husband won't have to deploy again and fight over there. He will be home.
Except everyone I know, who is in the know, is worried. Worried they won't be the only one in their family who is fighting anymore...worried when it comes home again, (and it will), it may be nuclear, or so bad, their wives and children will see up close and personal what they fought to keep away.
Frankly, I don't remember feeling this apprehensive about our country's future since I was old enough to learn about nukes and the fact Russia pointed some right at us. I lived with the underlying knowledge that at any time it could all end. We all did. It was a thread of tension, pulled taught, under the pursuit of happiness I chased as a child and young adult.
Then the wall came down and we were able to breathe a sigh of relief.....and we raised a generation without the threat of it over their heads. We turned our full attention to making life good for our kids so they never lived with that underlying thread of tension in their lives. Our culture taught them to be colorblind, gender-blind, somehow stressing the act of blindness is more important than the content of one's character.
They grew up. They voted. They voted for the type of government which honors cowardice, rewards slackers, penalizes success, and frankly stretches a rope of tension where that small Russian thread used to be.
Do you know what I see at the university level every day? A generation that is so self-centered, so self-obsessed, they believe the world owes them an easy ride...an "equal" ride. A position here-to-for reserved for adults reaching middle age and beyond, who realize their bad choices made them poor, sick, whatever, and want to be bailed out of the consequences of those decisions by the government.
They had their shot, they blew it, and they want the rest of the country to pay for it.
We have a whole generation of like minded young adults just entering into our realm of decision making. Instead of graduating university with the desire to work hard and change the world, they are joining with the aforementioned free rider middle aged adults and looking for ways to snatch things they didn't earn. No risk, no risk of failing.
These young adults look at their parents and believe life should start out with as much as it took their parents an entire life to become, to acquire, to learn. They take out student loans worth thousands of dollars without so much as a shrug. They expect their parents to pay for college by working two jobs if necessary, but they could never work and go to school, it might be too hard. They might fail. They deserve better.
Combine this generation with the older slackers and the middle is squashed, completely obliterated. In wanting such an easy life, they may indeed achieve it, but never anything above it. They will in fact be living and sucking up the resources it took this country generations to acquire. Standing on the accomplishments of the generations before them just long enough to break those shoulders and stomp the achievements into dust. And once the dust settles, America will be gone. Then they will turn, arms open wide, to other countries, countries they believe superior and hope for rescue. After all, they deserve it right? And then, maybe, once we are slaves to countries who have envied us for generations, we will finally see ...the American Dream once governed, is the American Nightmare.