America Has Gotten Angrier Why is it many people today seem a lot angrier than people used to be? I was discussing this with someone and they brought up a good point. They said it seems to have started with the Vietnam War. This was when some people took out their frustrations about the war on the military. I remember it like it was yesterday. There were people who would spit on those in uniform when they walked by. Never mind many of those soldiers were drafted. Before this people who served in the military were heroes. I am not just talking about World War II vets, but also those who served in Korea. As time went by and other wars were fought, we began to notice some of the veterans who came back had problems, but they weren’t getting adequate help and many became homeless and moved into the streets. In a great country like this one would have thought the government would have helped those who had put their lives on the line for their country, but this was not to be, and things just got worse until we reached the point we are at today. Today many think of these vets as a dirty nuisance rather than people needing help and just try and avoid them whenever possible. When did we stop caring about people? This seems to be quite recent. I can only talk about something I know about so let me tell you about how people were treated in New York State. There was a time when people with mental problems were sent to a mental hospital for treatment and help. Years ago, the then governor of New York decided to cut the number of patients in state mental institutions way down. One very large mental institution in my area was closed and another which formerly had room for 10,000 patients was cut to 600. We began to see a lot of people with mental problems out on the street and living on the sidewalks. The idea was to save money in the budget. While the state mental hospitals saved money many of the former patients landed up in jails where it was far more expensive to house them. Aside from the cost factor, these people did not belong in jail because they had not committed a crime, but the state had moved the problem from a state problem to a local one and off their budget to that of the cities and counties, because the money allocated for prisons had to be increased substantially. None of the politicians seemed to care enough to fix the problem. It was obvious people in distress just didn’t matter much to those in power. I can’t say the general public felt this way in this case because they probably didn’t realize what was going on. As time went by crime began to increase at a great rate. One person said something to me that I think expressed part of the problem with a lot of people not caring about others, and that was the fact religion was losing followers. Not just one religion, but all of them in the United States. Without God in their lives people would assign other things as being the most important such as status and wealth. Politics began to become vicious. It was not just a question of disagreement, but of an intractable opinion which bordered on physical violence at times and sometimes even came to blows. One cannot have a political debate today, because of the anger that envelopes anything political when two or more people of opposite political views come together. Today there are groups of people who go around beating up people because they don’t like what they are wearing or a bumper sticker on their car. What ever happened to people running for office and after the election accepting the results? No one wants to constantly be cursed out because of their political beliefs. The United States was founded because of religious and political oppression and yet it seems some are trying to oppress others and don’t want them to state their political opinions. What is next, religious oppression? The path this country is going down has been gone down before and the result was not pretty. Many people are expressing their belief the United States is committing a crime by enforcing some of its laws. The absurdity of this can only mean they have a method in their madness. There will be people reading this who will be disturbed I said this, but there is no denying the fact. Maybe I should say it can be denied, but that will not change the absurdity of it all. Some people who come to this country want to make it run like the one they came from. This boggles my mind because if that is what they want why did they come here? These people try and enforce their native laws and some even run the flags of the countries they left up the flag pole, after taking down the American flag. One question I have is should American law just be ignored? If so where does this stop. Should we do away with all laws or just the ones some of the more powerful people in our society don’t like. Why even have a system of laws if they can be ignored? Laws are some of the things that keep us safe and if there was no law there would be anarchy and rioting in the streets and we have already had some of that, rioting that is. There is certainly nothing wrong with peaceful demonstrations, but it is the rioting and looting there is no excuse for. I for one would like to see America peaceful again. But this cannot happen until some of the hate dissipates. We need to fix our political system somehow. We have one side which does nothing and another side which hates the first side and also does nothing constructive. The congress is broken and I can’t see for the life of me how it can be repaired. There are also a lot of things which make no sense anymore. When the requirements for jobs which required physical strength were lifted things changed a lot for the police and fire departments. One can no longer count on getting out of an upper story of a burning building because the fire person on the ladder may not be strong enough to lift you out onto the ladder if necessary. This is happening not just in this country but in many other countries. We need common sense to return to America and if it doesn’t happen soon, it may never return.
|
