Doug Soderstrom, Ph.D.

Sex, money, an avaricious appetite to acquire more and more things, power, prestige, a jingoistic attachment to that of “the fatherland,” and civil religion, and, in all probability, in that particular order.

Added to this there is the undeniable reality of our country’s longstanding desire to dominate the world, and all of such supported by a people who have, with no fight whatsoever, allowed themselves to have been brainwashed into believing that our country has been assigned the divine responsibility of carrying out the righteous will of God.

All of such leading to a ridiculously wicked claim that our country can do no wrong!

And finally ... this thing about war. There can be no misunderstanding that Jesus’ mandate to love is uncompromisingly opposed to the mass slaughter that defines the character of war. However, because so many have successfully distorted the teachings of Jesus, our country has been allowed to launch a decades-long campaign of death and destruction formulated to destroy all who refuse to play “the game” according to our rules (vis-a-vis the upcoming invasion of Iran).

As William Blum in his book, 'Killing Hope,' so tellingly describes, “It's not that [the leaders of our nation] take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't [seem to care] ... as long as death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... they just don't [seem to care].”

As a result of such actions millions of people have been killed, the rest having been condemned to a life of poverty, misery and despair. And of course, all of such through the rather loosely coordinated efforts of the government, the corporate community, mass media, the church, and that of our own public schools who have collectively decided that it would be in our best interests if we, the people, remained uniformly uninformed in regards to the ugly realities of our nation’s rather sordid past.

Accordingly, I must admit that I am terribly ashamed to have become associated with so much of what so many Americans have claimed to be so very proud.

And I am convinced that if our country is to once again become a beacon of light for the rest of the world to see, a strong and resilient democracy capable of standing up for that which is right and good, then the citizenry of our nation must reverse what has become a slow yet determined decline into a morass of ignorance and sloth, an abject unwillingness to face the fact that our country is under attack (not from without, but rather from within) by that of a rising tide of fascism threatening to consume everything that we, as a nation, once held dear, a neoconservative campaign eerily similar to that which occurred in Germany as Adolph Hitler rose to power.

In the meantime, however, I ask but one thing .. that God bestow upon us the wisdom to realize that time may be short, and that if we are to reclaim our nation, we have no choice but to recognize our constitutional right, our responsibility, and most importantly our duty...

...to throw aside, even to abolish, any body politic that might threaten to destroy a government created of the people, by the people, and...

Thank God for every one of the people of our country, the United States of America.
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Doug Soderstrom may be contacted at DougSod@wcjc.edu Wharton County Junior College