What Are We Doing?

I’ve long felt an outsider’s relationship to the government, to the society producing it. What do I mean? Government, supposed to serve society’s members, doesn’t do that, for it’s been perverted to gratify the desires and ambitions of the wealthy and those politicians they control with donations, perks, and promises of future riches after lost elections or lucrative voluntary retirements.

Even after usually not voting for politicians in either of the two major parties, I still supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. I found the McCain-Palin ticket ridiculous and vicious, the Romney-Ryan ticket corporate and soulless. I knew about Obama’s drone program—it’s killing of innocents in Yemen, for instance—by 2012, but I let the lesser-of-two-evils argument win. Romney seemed phony; my mother referred to him as a “Ken doll.”

I regret my votes for Obama-Biden. In retrospect, I know they’re a pair of corrupt killers and liars. Obama expanded the Global War on Terror. He failed to punish Wall Street executives for the 2008 crash. He didn’t close Guantanamo Bay, he broke his promise to ensure the codification of Roe v. Wade. He ensured that those in the Bush administration who had committed crimes against humanity could never be prosecuted. He’s a bloody scoundrel and his Vice President, Biden, is worse.

Joe Biden, though losing his cognitive abilities, nevertheless retains enough brain cells to carry out punishing and murderous campaigns against Palestinians in Gaza and against Ukrainians caught in a proxy war between NATO and Russia. I don’t understand the mentality of someone willing to inflict so much harm on humankind, but I suppose there are monetary reasons involved. Still, anyone willing to play such games with the lives of innocent people cannot be on the good side. This means, by extension, that the nation he presides over lacks moral justification for anything it pursues.

This gets to the essence of why I feel disconnected to my government and alienated from that part of my society which lacks compassion for America’s victims in other lands. Since the 1980s, when I was in my early twenties, I began discovering lies told by government officials—about the JFK assassination, about Iran-Contra, about Israel’s assumed right to exist in someone else’s country. Once I saw the mendacity I could never not see it. Yet, I continue to live in a country where such lying has become so institutionalized that a large portion of the population don’t know they believe in fantasies.

Fantasy is fine as long as one knows it’s not real. I love J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings but I know it’s a novel. Some Americans defend Israel’s destructive and genocidal actions in Gaza—enabled by Joe Biden, American weapon shipments, and U.S. taxpayer dollars—as they operate under the long-cultivated fantasy that Israel is so important to American security that it may even be the most important country on the planet.

It’s not. Unable to get along with its neighbors, Israel’s aggressive behaviors toward Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, are so egregious and irresponsible that if it were a person it would likely get put into a jail cell. The same can be said of its big brother, America, the nation that bombs, meddles, commits coups, arms Ukrainian Nazis, arms genocidal Jews, and won’t give its citizens universal health care even in the middle of a pandemic.

I don’t know which presidential candidate I’ll vote for this November. It should be obvious I won’t vote for Biden. I won’t vote for any Democrat or Republican. Trump’s callousness towards Palestinians and human life in general rivals Biden’s. Third party, maybe, but as I wrote above, I feel like an outsider. Yet, it looks like a growing number of Americans feel that way, too. We find it impossible to relate to politicians who allow something like what’s happening in Gaza to occur.