Distress Call From the Year 2010

[begin transmission] . . . S.O.S. . . yes, whoever you are, whatever you are, whenever you are -- you should be warned.  Don't let what happened to us happen to you.

The last three decades of the 20th century seemed like such halcyon days.  We never knew what was really going on.  The decade of freedom and free love slowly morphed into the greatest disparity of wealth in U.S. history, the economic enslavement of labor, the destruction of journalism, the press, free speech, the degradation of the government and community services, and the evisceration of civil liberty after civil liberty, all in the name of "security."  And all of it was by design, all along.

It started with the media.  We never thought that so many could be so misled by so few so much of the time.  But it happened.  The most outrageous lies were broadcast incessantly, to the point that truth and fact became malleable, fashionable, and deviant.  It didn't even matter what was the truth and fact, it was somehow more important to vilify whoever it was that was saying it.  The truth became suddenly either a state secret or treason.  Victor Hugo's post mortem spoke eloquently, "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act . . ."

Then it was politics.  Suddenly, the political machinery became simply a function of economics.  The more money there was to spend, the more influence could be had.  This stratified the wealthy class, which received anything it requested, bought and paid for, while the once-American ideals and principals that had been the foundation of protecting the middle and lower class were discarded, lost in the media deluge of hypernationalism, jingoism, and fundamentalist Christianity. 

The Middle Class was last.  The bulwark of U.S. society, the ballast and the anchor, the center and counterweight to profligacy and excess, was starved out of existence.  Those few who saw the Middle Class emaciated by loss of governmental services and declining real income for decades were attacked by those whom they sought to inform and save.  The anger and ire of class warfare was perverted into a hatred of a caricature of elite intellectuals.  Roosevelt's Brain Trust could no longer save those whom it was intended to save, as it was declared to be an internal enemy.

Finally, without this steadying presence, civil liberties were eroded and eradicated.  The prison system became one of the leading industries, as more and more money was funnelled out of the people's taxes and the people's wealth to imprison them.  The criminal justice system became based on retaliation and contrapasso, rather than rehabilitation and the hope of a better society.  But it was the money that flowed to this system, this Military-Industrial-Media-Prison Complex that resulted in more surveillance, more monitoring, more checkpoints, more warrantless searches, more walls to keep people out and to keep people in.

Do you read me?  Come in.  S.O.S.  Mayday . . . are you getting this message . . .

[end transmission]