What else is new?

Friday, June 8, 07

It has been seven long years since we first celebrated the wicked New Years Eve that began the coming of the new millennium. Seven years, six months, and eight to be exact. For one to say things have changed is a rather erroneous understatement.

America was a prosperous nation, for the most part at peace with the rest of the world. Sure, we had our problems, but in hindsight, those seem pretty petty to the adversities we now face. There was promise. Our future actually looked somewhat bright. It seemed as though, looking from a distance, that the world might actually turn out to be a better place after our first decade in double oughts were up. What a viscous mirage that turned out to be.

It is six years later and all that hope is gone, flushed down the toilet along with the good image that America once enjoyed like an unwanted piece of bacon fat by the wild eyed Texan and his diversified cabinet of falsified do-gooders that we elected to look after our best interests. No longer will any of us in this lifetime awaken to a calm world at peace. It seems somewhat more likely now that one day we will wake up to a nuclear winter.

Long gone are the days of Bill Clinton and his hilarious sexual escapades. They have been replaced by trigger happy vice presidents and made up weapons of mass destruction. The dreaded New Vietnam in the deserts of the Middle East has arrived with all the splendor and destruction of a sandstorm filled with rose thorns and shot nails. It all happened almost too quietly to notice.

Not to be outdone, nature has reared her powerful head over and over again. From the tsunami in Asia, the seemingly constant stream of earthquakes, and the ever popular Katrina, we have been shown time and time again that no matter how technologically advanced we may think we are, we are all still nothing more than the mere playthings of this Earths great elements.

It is time to wake up, fellow planet dwellers. It is time to realize that America, indeed, the entire world, will never be the same again. The utopia that was within our grasp those few short years ago is gone forever, lost in another timeline somewhere deep in an alternate dimension that does not include guys like George Bush and Osama Bin Laden. It was almost close enough to wave goodbye as those towers fell that ominous day in September nearly six years ago.

For some reason, it just doesnt seem right to blame ourselves. Sure, we may all have different political views, but we are not the ones who did this. It was all brought upon us by a small group of overly powerful fools. No matter which side of the conservative/liberal chalk line you may fall on, there is no denying the fact that we have somehow sailed up the proverbial shit creek. This time, instead of being without paddles, we gave them to someone else to guide us with. Now we are five minutes away from the waterfall and we can either watch the tree line complacently while we fall over the edge or we can throw the asshole with the oars out of the boat and row like hell away from the rocks.

Keep those metaphorical oars handy. One day soon we may have to brain the captain, and it will take all of us rowing at once to get ourselves out of this mess. What else is new....