angry up the blood

I've been warming up to the class a lot more, though I wish we were in a room with ten of the people who don't talk as much but when they do generally have more to say, and that we could go more in depth than we do sometimes.

I used to wonder how we got so stupid in this country and I understand more and more that there are people out there who consider themselves decent and open-minded human beings who due to a sense of exceptionalism and superiority, seem to have no problem with blowing places halfway around the world to smithereens with 7-year-old-level answers like THEY STARTED IT, or THEY DID IT TOO WHY CAN'T WE.

Right.

You can still be on the theoretical good side of history and be very, very wrong. There's two people in the class who are German, one whose father had to walk home 5,000 miles from a POW camp in Stalin's Russia and whose mother survived the bombing of Dresden, and another who was 15 when the war ended and fills in the names and dates with striking details pulled from his memories.

And we can talk about genocides and gulags as something other people do, but maybe we don't have death camps, but we have black sites, we haven't nuked anyone, but someone can push a button and predator drone someone halfway around the world. Are we as a country morally superior to our enemies? Everyone thinks they are, be they AMERICA OF GOD AND FREEDOM or those who want to take out the Great Satan. Everyone thinks they're the heroes and they're willing to send out schlubs to get themselves killed while they sit back and watch.

I'm sick of hearing about Occupy Wall Street because it's so fucking self-absorbed. Yeah, life is hard here, trust me, I know this, but your lifestyle makes liFe pretty damn hard for everyone else who ends up with a lot of suck because your car needs gas and you need the new iPhone whose metals come from Congo. We are the 1% of the rest of the world, people, especially white people with college degrees and parents with some means.

We'd do a whole lot better we stopped occupying all these other places all over the world, but that won't happen because the government (does it really seem to matter anymore if it's Bush or Obama if you really step back and look at what's actually going on) and their tandem corporations have a lot to gain from our adventuring.

It's getting better all the time someone tells me, and maybe it is for him personally, but how can you really look at the downward spiral and see that, is your myopia so strong you can't see past your immediate experience? I just don't know.