Has anyone else here been having feelings of complete dread lately?

[PatrickforB]

138. Well, we have been exceptional at killing lots of people really fast!

Genocide, conquest and slavery: the three pillars of our current republic.

I love this country, too. I do - or to put it more precisely, I love what this country COULD BE if we could actually grow up and put people over profits and stop policies that enrich a few billionaire parasites at the expense of all the rest of us.

You know Stephen King? The writer? One of my favorites is the Gunslinger series, featuring Roland of Gilead, the last Gunslinger, Jake, Eddie and Susannah, as they seek out the Dark Tower in the hope they can fix the world, which has 'moved on.'

Sometimes I feel like this world has moved on. God knows, it is not the same country it was when I was a kid (self-disclosure, I'm white, male and suburb-raised).

I often ask myself what was that moment, that instant, where things started accelerating down that slope toward 'worse.'

I think it was Kennedy's assassination. I always have seen that as a successful coup by the Military Industrial Complex. We could talk a long time about the pros and cons of that, but JFK's death allowed the chicken-hawks like McNamara, Rusk and Westy to talk LBJ into sending 500,000 people over there.

That did it. That war cost $1 trillion in today's dollars ($168 billion then), and most of that went to the MIC for weapons, ammo and other military gear. All so the little boys could dress up in their Generals' uniforms, spend our money, and play a game of dominoes that killed 1.35 million people, and maimed millions more, including 1.3 million Vietnam vets that are paid disability.

Now, oh joy! we have the Prison Industrial Complex and the War on Drugs. Just as bad.