What has been drummed into Americans

From my Writing Room

Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

Almost everything in the US is left to run itself to a certain extent, because the majority of Americans is hostile to any regulations. Some consequences of this are what can now be seen in Texas: people have flooded homes with icicles hanging from the ceiling, and they are lining up for drinking water like in a third world country.

Power companies have created local grids to circumvent federal regulations with the ulterior motive to pocket as much profit as possible. Meanwhile, the power grid throughout nearly the entire country is held together literally by shoe laces and chewing gum. As soon as a bird shits on the line or everyone turns on their coffee makers at the same time, the power goes out.

Wooden power poles… I can see one every day in my backyard in Blairsville/Georgia when I look out the kitchen window. Each time I feel as if I am looking into the face of a ghost, or as if something has catapulted me back into a past century. I have a faint memory of them as a child: At the end of the 60s/beginning of the 70s, such poles were removed in the GDR (former East Germany) and the lines within cities, towns and villages were completely laid underground. Yet, when we watched the West German television every evening, then we saw the progress in western democracies, and we were convinced at that time that the GDR was lagging behind the world standard in all things developmentally. ^[1] That was half a century ago. I was there, I have witnessed it: The powerlines disappeared from the streetscape. The rich USA can’t bring this about? They land on Mars, while down on earth, in their own country, everything goes from hand to mouth.

Americans nowadays have a strong tendency to acquiesce in everything that is done to them; they rather leave everything up to their dear God, indulge themselves in conspiracy theories and unrealistic conclusions while keep watching as everything collapses. And when they actually do decide to protest, then they do not bring the matter to a countable end result. ^[2]

The pattern always remains the same: The root of all evil in the United States is the free rein of the big money, utterly unregulated and unattended by any government ^[3], and its accumulation in the hands of a few who don’t give a damn about the collective good of the country. It makes no sense to support somebody like Trump, who did not do anything about it, either – on the contrary, he gave the wealthiest corporations the largest tax relief in history.

It rather takes staunch government intervention to bring about the equality of treatment of all people and a fair distribution of wealth, as it was the basic liberal idea leading to the American birth through a revolt against the British oppressors from 1775 to 1783. This has nothing to do with socialism, as is usually drummed into Americans – take a look into your own, American history books. Read what Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, had to say about the big money harming the American society, about government control, about Unions, about more justice in terms of equality. The moral of his views is valid, then as now.

As long as Americans do not or do not want to recognize the true problem in their country and do something about it, they can be dealt with at will, and nothing will ever really change – regardless who the president is and regardless which party they vote for.

Notes:

[1] We could not travel to the West to visit our own relatives. An impenetrable inner-German border with minefields, barbed wire, watchtowers, and automatic firing systems made every attempt to escape a suicide mission. – The travel ban was the main cause of the peaceful revolution in the GDR in the fall of 1989, which eventually led to the fall of the Wall and Germany’s reunification.

[2] The “Black Lives Matter” initiative has literally petered out, it seems.

[3] Unlike in democratic countries in Western Europe.