I am so sick of America right now. Not the beauty of it, not the idea of it...but the reality of 300+ million people screaming at each other. We're still overwhelmingly wealthy but we run around bitching and moaning about everything. It's like we're tired of being happy.
We find this the most in our current political situation. On the one hand there exists Trump and his enablers in whatever remains of the 'conservative' movement. These are the people who have all the political power and are seeking to use that power only for the benefit of themselves. These people are easy to mock, though they see themselves as the virtuous persecuted moral majority. They have lost all spiritual and political credibility with many of us, but their desire to Take Back America, to Make America Great Again continues on in their self-righteous pea-brained minds. On the other hand is the 'liberal' movement. These people actually have the upper hand in the culture wars at the movement. Americans as a whole are tolerant and increasingly acceptable of all that they stand for in sexuality, in lifestyle choices, in whatever is the issue of the moment. They may have no political sense at this point beyond just screaming about how unfair the other side is, but they are winning the long game. I have no home here, either. Calling wrong right will never be right. Accepting all things, and demanding others do the same, is no way to get me on their side. Some things are simply wrong, and deserve to be called wrong.
Both sides have so much of what they want, but they're never happy, and led by the increasingly shrill ideological press telling people what they want to hear, they just get angrier and angrier. And their yelling is giving me a headache. I'm tired of both, and just once I'd like somebody who is a good solid moderate, like I still think 70% of American really are, who will speak on my behalf. Who will say,
-I don't really like big government and taxes, but we have to pay for things like roads and schools and national security so that we don't burden the future generations with our bills. Having to do stupid fundraisers so that after-school activities is not healthy. Letting our infrastructure crumble because we've had to gut the transportation budget so that we can again cut taxes is stupid. Things cost money, and squeezing these things down until government does the job poorly and then claiming that all government is inefficient and wasteful is, shall we say, moronic. Let's figure out what we need to buy, get the money to do it, and do it well. I couldn't care less about the big government vs. small government argument anymore...I just want good government.
-I accept that people may have different lifestyle choices. This is America, after all, the land of the free. I need to accept that you may live differently than I do, and though I may not like it, I can accept it. But by gosh, stop telling me that I'm a bigot if I think homosexual behavior is a sin; this is not the same thing as racial civil rights! Fine...you can be married and have all the legal rights you want, but stop telling me I have to approve of it. And stop saying I'm a Nazi if I think people should use bathrooms that their genitals suggest they should. Stop it with this politically correct nonsense that the military, a place of group cohesion above all things, has to accept everybody's individual cross-dressing choices.
-I am thankful that we still have a great social safety net in which the poorest and neediest amongst us are provided for; it's a God-given blessing to take care of some, and in fact there will always be people like this. But stop thinking I have to enable people to live lazy, fat, unhealthy lives. I'm sick of making charity calls at people's houses when they can't pay their utility bills and noticing that they have a 60" TV in the front room. They make their choices in freedom...but don't expect me to pay for them.
-I think it's great that America is a land of opportunity. Technology and entrepreneur risk allow people to become wealthy. But stop telling me that it's fair that we keep suppressing wages of the poorest amongst us even as we say that a rising tide lifts all boats. No, it doesn't. Too many people are sinking out there because tiny boats are flooded by the wakes of all the yachts. Raise the minimum wage already. If it means a billionaire has to sell a yacht once in awhile, fine. And stop with the argument, "If people on minimum wage just had more ambition, they wouldn't be on minimum wage." That's just stupid. There's a reason we don't let some people into medical school. Some people ain't smart. Some people are not good at many things. But they still have a right in the wealthiest culture in history to be able to live without worrying all the time, even if maybe we ought to make them take a personal finance course once in awhile.
Just looking at my above gripes makes me completely ineligible for public office. Somebody will call me intolerant or a libtard or think I am contradicting myself or something else...I'd be shouted down before I even got to the third line of my stump speech. But more than anything, I just can't be heard through the roar of the tumult. I'm not screaming these things out in ALT-CAPS and so my voice isn't going to be nearly as loud as the idiots that have taken to Breitbart or Vox. There's simply too much common sense for people in an ideological rage to hold onto. My political career would be over long before it started.
Yet somewhere out there somebody has enough sense to unite those of us in the middle who are sick of both sides screaming at us and making us afraid, and they can do it better than I do without offending everybody. Maybe we're too far gone, I don't know...but as it stands now, I'm just about sick of it all.
