It’s not any of the huge problems we face. In other words, it’s not peak oil. It’s not the way deficit spending and the trade deficit are destroying the economy. It’s not that so many young minds are being trashed by something that passes for “education” when it is actually a wierd combination of warehousing children and filling their heads with useless factoids.   It’s not the occupation of Iraq.  It’s not that the U.S. government has been almost totally purchased by huge corporations.  It’s not that we spy on each other and that we torture in the name of freedom.   It’s not that people spout religious nonsense rather than working together to solve real world challenges. It’s none of these things. 

Rather, my fear is that the citizens (including the citizens that still care) no longer have the capacity to have meaningful public conversations with our “leaders.”   We all know that our politicians talk one way in public yet behind closed doors they must talk another way.  They must talk some other way with their closest friends and advisers.  It would be too disturbing to think otherwise.  And yet we must deal with the way they talk to and at us.  But there is no productive way of dealing with this.  Words have become cheap because they are untied to the things and people real world.  We talk at each other instead of trying to change things for the better.   We’d rather stand around claiming that we “care” than doing anything that takes us from our amusements.

And because we can no longer dialogue with our national leaders in public, we no longer have the capacity to truly address any of those problems in the first paragraph.  This will continue as long as we allow ourselves to remain divided into huge camps that distrust each other so much more than we distrust ourselves.  We are divided almost equally these days.  We are thus hopelessly incapacitated as a country.  We are stalemated against each other; we are the personification of Burriden’s Ass. 

And there’s no help on the way, at least for the time being.  We seem to be incapable of learning until we actually feel the pain for the decisions we are making for running this country.  And that pain seems to be on the way for many of us.  When that day comes, when we realize that we are responsible for our own predicament, we might be reduced to prayer and hope.  Even those of us who don’t believe in prayer or hope. 

Let us hope that we can start learning little lessons from our pain before we so utterly wreck our way of life that the natural consequences of our irresponsibility, the waves of insurmountable pain, make permanent wretched fools of us all.