Fear and Loathing in America

This is bad, and every day it seems to be getting worse.  Our crazy train is going off of the rails in a decidedly non-Ozzy-wild-party sort of way.  The rage and hate has gotten the better of us. Someone even crossed the line at Fox News for being too rude to President Obama.  Color me shocked that Fox News even had that line.  An ex military man responded to Obama's speech about responding to Daesh by using an epithet that was so out of the bounds of good taste that even Fox had to say, "whoa dude, you went too far."
It occurs to me that it's not just the bad word, it is what it reveals about a certain mindset present in American culture at the moment.  It is present in the ravings of presidential hopeful and egomaniac Donald the Trump.  It is present in the gun in my back pocket speech by Jerry Falwell Jr. It is present in the general fear and loathing that infests us at the moment.  We are responding like bullies.  The word that was used by Ralph Peters to describe our President is a word that is usually accompanied by a shove in the chest and a wedgie by some hyper-thyroidal seventh grader.  It is a word straight out of pornographic dirty talk.  It is not a word that should be used in polite conversation or indeed in any form of speech that wishes to be taken seriously by adults.
And a grown man used it about the elected leader of the most powerful nation on earth, because we haven't gone all total war on ISIS.  This is precisely in the same context and manner that a bully would try to goad someone into a fist fight behind the gym.
That's where we are America.  That's where this has brought us.  I hope you're satisfied.
We need to repent.  Despite the reality that I just sounded like a scolding middle school teacher, I say WE need to repent, because this culture includes me, I am a part of it, and if things are broken, I bear responsibility for that.
Once upon a time, I was talking to a very wise uncle of mine.  We were discussing the ins and outs of the tax code and the general prospects of the continued solvency of Social Security.  He was "splaining" as he said, how the federal gubmint had been borrowing money from Social Security for years and not paying it back, which is essentially not a problem until the Baby Boomers started retiring and all of the sudden the foundations of the whole thing start to erode.  All of this was rather news to me, but I have long lived with a fatalism about the whole enterprise upon which my retirement will depend at least in some part.
At some point I asked, rather incredulously, why this sort of thing is allowed to go on?  Why don't we change the rules?  Why doesn't any of this get fixed?
His answer: "Someone with enough money and power wants it to stay the way it is."
"But democracy..." I stammered, suddenly feeling rather more desperate to understand than any 30 year old with Masters degree really ought to feel.  My Uncle Larry just sort of shook his head.
"I'd give mine back if I thought it would do you any good," he said, "but it wouldn't, they'd just steal that too."
Since that conversation, I have started to look differently at the systems we are a part of, and examining those things that are only explicable by an irrational maintenance of the status quo.  I understand mistrusting the government, I do, but where are we if we can't at least acknowledge the humanity of our leaders (and they do sometimes make that difficult).  No matter what you think of Obama, for instance, he deserves the respect due his office, not the derision of "playground" thugs.
I repent if I have thought of those I disagree with as "morons," "idiots," "racists," "thieves," "bandits," or any other number of derogatory things I might call them.  I will not back away from honest descriptions (such as calling Trump an egomaniac, he totally is one, and he would probably agree). But I do not wish to participate in a national re-enactment of Lord of the Flies, or the Sixth Grade.  It's not taking us anywhere good.