In the ten years since leaving America, it seems that I have stood still while America has moved onwards and upwards...
There is now an African-American in the White House - who´s birthplace is in question by a group called the “birthers” - and according to my pop-up internet feed, President Obama has a suspicious scar on his head (oh my!) that some believe is from an undisclosed brain surgery. I suspect this same group also believes that he is an Islamic extremist with a fake birth certificate - essentially the Manchurian Candidate incarnate, or worse.
Frankly, this is an America that I no longer understand. I understood (and was in)the Vietnam War, the War on Crime, the Central-American War, the War on Drugs, the Oil War- but these new Wars have me feeling baffled (and thankful I have been left out). I suspect Pakistan is feeling a bit of the same, and may be that is why this week they booted the CIA out of the country, just saying “No to Drones.”
Perhaps Pakistan has read the writing on the Chadian wall and sees that they could be the next Libya 10 years down the line. Rightly so if history does indeed repeat - but back to the America that I no longer understand, I do not get why the new age of mainstream media has a hard time repeating anything historical, or reiterating in a report what was then, as compared to what is now. Do you?
For example, the American government considers the vote to raise the debt ceiling from its current $14.3 trillion loft. Who recalls (and then recants) that just 10 years earlier the debt ceiling was less then $6 trillion? Projections for the next 10 years could see that ceiling rise to double, approaching $30 trillion by 2021. That is a number hard to imagine, and honestly, just downright disturbing.
That is the America that I remember – warnings of impending doom unless spending was drastically decreased (to reduce the national debt) - repeated over the decades until it became a background drone.
I am certainty not an economist, and I know more about lowering home ceilings than about national ones, but even a simple carpenter understands that if you are increasing your debt above a pre-set amount year after year, that in essence, you have no real limit - the sky is the limit - whoo-hoo! Unfortunately, that also means that your business is also in very deep doo doo, if you are in business at all after a decade of in-the-red years.
In 2006, then Senator Obama voted to stop that year´s national debt increase, and he called loudly for some degree of fiscal sanity, yet in today’s internet feed, he says his past Senate vote was a “mistake,” and it would be "Armageddon-like" for the economy not to raise the debt limit this year, seeing that Americans are falling further into debt at the tune of $128 billion a month.
Wow. I have lived through several cycles of the American economy, which frankly has always seemed to be on a slow downward spiral for most of the lower and middle classes, with little blips and booms along the way, but nothing like the past 10 years of this “up and then really far down” fall from grace.
The Armageddon that President Obama speaks of is one that folks have been talking about since I was a kid (almost 4 decades ago): Cuts or gutting of Social Security, the end of Medicaid / Medicare as we know it and a slew of other cuts to all aspects of social spending. Oh, and every once in a while someone whispers of cutting from the mega-military budget...
That is the America that I remember – warnings of impending doom unless spending was drastically decreased (to reduce the national debt) - repeated over the decades until it became a background drone; a white noise that everyone (including sitting Presidents) chose to ignore.
It must be an awful headache for the lawmakers in Washington, and a tremendous migraine for President Obama to have to deal with a looming debt in the multiple tens of trillions of dollars, with multiple wars going on, and multiple healthcare and retirement plans to pay for. Personally, I get throbbing temples just thinking about my own plan that must be wilting away through all of this.
So, perhaps while the President goes in to have his head examined over the budget, he will also get this brain surgery rumour cleared up before his bid for re-election, and perhaps refocusing the debate from birth certificates to the future of America, a place filled with wonderful memories.
Herojig is quirky kinda expat happily living in the Kathmandu valley with Nepali family, friends and a very large dog – but today waxing nostalgic for few hours with the Dodgers vs. Giants
herojig@gmail.com
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All night long
