WAXHAW:
Friday, March 4th, 2011
by John Tiley  

One of the truly great creative television series of the early 60's was the Twilight Zone. And forever etched in my memory were those words Rod Serling used to set the premise of his story "... for your approval". And with that in mind today I submit for Your Approval that we have somehow taken the wrong turn, rode an unintended bus to a destination we did not intend to go to..... After all, are we not the keepers of the greatest nation the world has ever known? The nation that took the outcasts unto its bosom and chopped a thriving nation out of an undeveloped hostile land? Defeated the fascists and imperialists from overtaking the entire world and beat the communists into bankrupt submission? Put men in space and on the moon and built ships that explore the deepest depths of our oceans?

Yet, over the past two or three decades, yes decades, we have been led down the wrong path! And in the process, subjected to a gutting of our capabilities as a nation. This isn't just a few jobs or even professions lost to competition. It has been the systematic dis-assembly of our business on a country-wide scale! Entire factories sent to places like Mexico and China not only because of cheap labor, but with an even greater worldwide (and so far greatly unacknowledged environmental) impact! An effect and expense long since outlawed in America.

From design and innovation to production and manufacturing. And more recently the devastation of a falsely inflated property evaluation ...a financial house of cards which we have all seen collapse around us! Yes indeed, it has been those wonderful folks on Wall Street.... the captains of industry and heads of the banks that have raped and pillaged our country with their incessant greed!

Hypothetically I ask you, if America were called upon to launch an effort such as we did at the onset of World War II, do you realize it would be all but impossible? We no longer have the capabilities to manufacture our own steel, build planes trains and tanks in the number an all out conflict would require. What, would we buy them from China?

And what would we use to buy them with? As we allowed our country's business to be trashed so did we trash our ability to raise the cash necessary and as a result we see states going bankrupt by the dozens not to mention the fiscal trouble the Feds are in.

I respectfully submit that we desperately need somebody to step forward such as Hoover did with Capone and his Ilk ...or McCarthy did with communism. In either case it was the pursuit of the Devils among us, the people engaged in UN-American Activities that are our greatest threat! And as McCarthy might have said... these are UN-American Activities, perpetrated by traitors and those actions need to be treated as the treason they are!

No, I don't directly remember the McCarthy days but I am old enough to remember diving under a desk during air raid exercises (like a school desk would offer any protection from a nuclear bomb). And I do remember years of living with the threat of World War III and a Nuclear holocaust! With the implication that there were Russian Spies everywhere all trying to steal our secrets. And living in a nation that was prepared and capable of dealing with such an unimaginable war. But no longer do I believe we could cope with such an endeavor.

By now I am sure that the folks that launched the Tea Party have a serious case of “buyers Remorse” and realize they have been hoodwinked by the Republicans and their Corporate minders... if they start now, well there are the elections of 2012 ...if we last that long?

In Mr. Serling's stories he rarely left you with a clear or even pleasant ending to his stories. And here neither can I. Only hope that in the morning we will all wake up and find that, just maybe, it was nothing more than a bad dream? ...in the Twilight Zone.