Dumbstruck

AT&T wants you to watch what you say about them, or you'll get disconnected. Verizon tries to tell you what they'll permit you to say. The cable company wants to sell you a telephone. The phone company wants to sell you their television programs. Pfizer has a drug they think you'll want to buy. Blackwater whispers a few words in the back halls of Washington, and politicians go mute.

Congressional Democrats celebrate their return to power by inviting the corporate fat cats to come on back across the aisle. Candidates compete for who can be the toughest on terror, babbling meaningless platitudes as the pabulum-digesting press scribbles their words faithfully.

Children sit glued to the television with jiggling potbellies and complain about being bored on a sunny summer day, unable to concentrate on anything, unable to speak a coherent thought, unable to see the world around them. Their parents won't let them go outside, ride their bikes around the block, walk to school.

The Constitution lies trampled on the floor with unitary executives lusting at the chance to repeal the twentieth century while whimpering progressives are unable to complain much less to act. Habeas corpus is gone. Due process is short-circuited by scowling men hidden behind tall walls. America the beautiful is choked by the smog of hatred, as its people sit speechless, shaking in the corner, paralyzed by fear, watching everything they love running down the drain.

Starving, drought stricken people hold up their arms to shield themselves in the desert while the armies of death and destruction ride over the hill and descend upon them. Punks, hoodlums and mobsters take the helm in Russia. A clown speaks to shouting crowds in Venezuela, crowds desperate for something other than what the system has been giving them. And another clown halfway around the globe revels in the glow of attention heaped on him when he posits that perhaps we need to do a little more research into that theory of the holocaust. And the torn saffron robes and blood-stained flesh of monks lie rotting in the jungle.

You ask me why I've been quiet lately. You ask me what's got me down.

I cannot speak. I am simply dumbstruck.

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