The news headlines blurt out the unthinkable once again.  50 dead and many more injured in what seems like a bad movie come to life.  A club in Orlando terrorized by another madman claiming his allegiance to ISIS.  How can we stop the senseless slaughter of our citizens and those of innocent people all over the world?  The words “Muslim extremist” weren’t even in our vocabularies ten years ago, yet those words are on the lips of nearly every US citizen today.

What do these so called extremists have to gain and how do we stop them?  It’s really not as easy as everyone seems to think.  Taking away everyone’s guns, building a wall around our country and not letting anyone in that looks like they might be Muslim is not feasible and it really won’t work anyway.

Terrorists are everywhere and they aren’t just Muslim extremists.  There are all kinds of people out there that are really terrorists, on a smaller scale, but they are still terrorists none the less.  Think of gangs terrorizing neighborhoods, hackers making chaos of people’s lives by messing with their identity, credit cards, bank accounts.  In fact, sometimes I believe there are more bad people out there than good.  Why is that?

For one thing in our modern society we don’t punish people for being bad, we reward them.  Yes, that’s right.  The average Joe may have no hope in his life for fame and fortune, but go out and murder your whole family, there you are…famous on the evening news.  In jail for the rest of his life?  Yep, but for someone who has no life anyway, it seems pretty exciting.  Some people adore attention, be it negative or otherwise and there is always someone to indulge them.  A kid disobeys his mother and somehow falls into the Gorilla enclosure while his mother is dinking around with her phone or doing whatever, now him and his mother are famous and somebody will probably give the kid a freaking scholarship.

Nobody is held accountable for anything anymore and most people are not willing to be helpful because there’s just no reward in intervening.  Should the mother at the zoo be held responsible?  Whether there was a gorilla involved or not, when your 4 year old rambunctious child is standing at the edge of a precipice, you don’t take your hands off that kid for a second.  I don’t care how many other kids you have in your care.  I’m sure the zoo was crowded, you can’t tell me a bystander didn’t see the kid just going for it.  Sure, maybe the mother will cuss you out for grabbing her kid, but for God’s sake, who lets a kid fall into a pit, just to make a point?  Were you thinking to yourself, “Mom wasn’t paying attention, serves her right!” It’s amazing the kid didn’t break his neck just falling into the enclosure, forget the fact that there was a dangerous Gorilla in there.  Really, there was no one else around that could grab this kid before he went down?  Bad mother or not, WTF people?

We’re Americans, we just chalk it up as a small mistake.  Why?  Because parenting is hard.  That’s just it, parenting is hard, not to be taken lightly.  Kids will do anything in a split second if you take your eyes off of them. No, you do not have time to answer that text, your kid is jumping off a freaking cliff!

Wake up America! Like a bunch of sheep being led to their slaughter, half the country is sitting there thinking, “it’s okay, The Donald is going to save us”.  The other half thinks, “Hillary will put the country back on the right path”.  I can only hope that there are a few people out there like me that are thinking, “Holy shit, what the hell are we going to do?” I have to say it again, wake up people!

As a country we are basically limping along with a nation full of people who are obviously confused and seem to be very poorly educated.  They seem to think we can “Make America great again” with either one of the lame choices we have in front of us to be “Commander in Chief” of our nation.  Are you people freakin kidding me?  I want a president that my children and all the people of the world can look up to and trust, so I’m not sure if you have all forgotten the past escapades of these two candidates, but I can’t put my trust or my starry-eyed admiration on the likes of either one of them!

First “Make America great again” is sort of a false term.  America is my home and I love living here, don’t get me wrong.  But let’s be realistic and take off our blinders for a moment.  The truth is, it was never really great, at least not for many of our citizens, if you look at the details in our short, yet slightly tarnished history.  Yes, we have won some wars.  Lots of soldiers have lost their lives.  So yes, Americans do have a reputation for getting what they want at the point of a gun, but does that make a nation great?

Firstly, building a wall to keep out so called “undesirables” is completely ludicrous. I hate to tell you, but unless you are 100% Native American, your ancestors are emigrants.  Yep, once the Native Americans were deemed by the White man to be “savages” the “white Christians” (who had guns by the way) drove them off the land so that they could have it for themselves.

Okay.  Now that we have driven the natives off their land, what are we to do with it?  Work the land, of course and make lots of money.  Unfortunately, that’s a lot of work.  That might mean hiring people and paying them a fair wage.  That will never do.  Luckily, someone had the bright idea of bringing in slaves, an idea that was already in use in other parts of the world.  Sure, why not kidnap people from their home land and exploit them?  They apparently aren’t doing anything else with their lives, right?

Now that we have conquered the indians and brought in African slaves to solve our labor problem, is America great now?  Just wait folks, it’s going to get better.  (Sarcasm, in case you didn’t recognize it)  We still have a lot of years before anyone but a white man is considered important in this country.  Yes, that’s right, women have been second class citizens for a very long time.  Men have considered themselves smarter, stronger and just better in general for a very long time.  I will give them the stronger part, that is a scientific fact, but smarter, not necessarily.

Women of all religions have suffered at the hands of men who claim to be superior, they have been the victim of arranged marriages, rapes, beatings, and whatever else deemed necessary by men.  All because of their sex. If you pay close attention to the media you will realize it is still happening.  This is because many people still believe men are better and more important than women.

How is this still going on, you ask?  I wish I knew, I just see the evidence of the “Good Old Boy System” in play whenever a rape sentence is handed down.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer that no one should go to jail and be deprived of their freedom when there is only circumstantial evidence available, but this most recent rape (you know exactly which one I’m talking about) had witnesses, so there was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that this guy did it.  The judge didn’t want to mess up this guy’s life over a few minutes that was obviously a mistake  (more sarcasm). Yes, she was passed out drunk, but if you are truly a nice, Christian guy and you see this woman passed out, shouldn’t you try to help her and get her to safety, so that no one hurts her?  Yes chivalry is dead.

Okay, so in 1920 women finally get the right to vote, that’s good right?  They are citizens and they have opinions so they should have the right to vote, don’t you agree?  Well folks, just because you have the “right” to do something, doesn’t mean you actually get to do it.  Many husbands and fathers simply prohibited their female counterparts from voting.  Those that actually snuck away and did it were sometimes beaten, shamed, divorced, etc.  You see for so many years a wife has been looked on as “property” not as an actual person.  Unfortunately, many religions still believe that a woman should be subservient to a man, she should obey the man.  I like to think of marriage as a team effort.  I believe it is better for the participants in the marriage and the children of the marriage.  If you feel like a prisoner in your own house where someone else makes all the rules, how can you possibly be happy?

Now, let’s get back to making America great.  First, let us take a look back on our history, just to get an idea how “great” America has been, since I get the feeling some of us have forgotten exactly what has happened over the past several hundred years.  Since we’ve already covered a few topics we will be starting sometime after the Emancipation Proclamation.  The slaves are now “free” or at least in theory they are.  In 1870 they get the right to vote, at least the men do.  Women will not be given this right until some fifty years later in 1920, New Zealand was the first country to give women this right, back in 1893 so we were a bit behind the times.

The first great war, World War I, our nation was sitting pretty because it was not our problem and we were essentially isolated from all of it.  Unfortunately, our nation’s leaders feel we are a supreme power in the world and at some point, we feel like we have to get involved.  This probably sets us up for our involvement years later in WWII, but what the heck?  We are warriors, so off to war we go.  Over 53,000 American men alone lost their lives in this war.  That means that somewhere around 53,000 families were grieving the loss of one or more family members over a war that was never even meant for us.  Feeling great yet?

As a nation we managed to stay out of World War II for a little bit, but the Japanese bombing  of Pearl Harbor was the catalyst for America jumping into the war with both feet.  This war has been known as the most deadly conflict ever and it resulted in the deaths of more than 131,000,000 Americans.  In case you’re keeping track that is a whole lot more grieving families that have lost a loved one.

That war ended with a bang when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the not only the immediate deaths of thousands, but the horrible deaths by radiation poisoning of not only soldiers but innocent women and children.  People who had no voice in this war, who were simply going about their everyday lives.  Perhaps you think that was fair, because their country was the enemy.  Would you still think it was fair if the tables had been turned and it was your children or grandchildren that had been killed by a huge weapon of mass destruction?

Think about this, should we, as a citizen be punished for every single stupid decision our county’s leadership makes?  I sure hope not, because this country has done a lot of stupid things, that I personally do not want to be held accountable for.

America is still not great at this point, in fact, as far as I can tell, it’s barely likable.  Of course we are not done playing around with weapons of mass destruction yet.  Between 1946 and 1962 our government basically commandeered the Marshall islands for it’s nuclear weapons testing, displacing the citizens to neighboring islands and ultimately poisoning thousands of others with the nuclear fallout.  Bikini Atoll which took several of the largest blasts was supposed to be ready for residents to return in 6 months and guess what, it’s still not safe for them to go back! Never heard much about any of this?  Yeah, it’s kind of glossed over in our history textbooks.

Is American great yet?  Well, so far we are only up to 1959.  Unfortunately, our government has no problem bullying the smaller and weaker nations of the South Pacific.  Remember the joyful news that we were going to make Hawaii our 50th state? That’s great right?  Yes, unless you are Hawaiian and realize that we basically comandeered the island of Hawaii out of the hands of it’s Monarchy, violently, at the point of a gun.  All for someone else’s profit.  I bet you never read that school!

So what is my point?  My point is American was never great, it’s been a violent, greedy nation pretty much since the very beginning.  It’s been a place where if you don’t fit this specific ideal of being a white, straight, christian man, you have been subject to ridicule, humiliation, and perhaps a whole host of things that are even worse than that.

I realize that we only have these two terrible candidates to choose from in this upcoming presidential election and I can not imagine that either one of those choices can make America great.  If you truly want to do your civic duty,make sure you do your homework. Educate yourself and make sure you use sources out of the mainstream media.  There are billions of dollars being funneled into our media to make sure you only learn what the media outlets and their supporters want you to know.

Take your responsiblity seriously and re evaluate what kind of world you want our children to grow up in.  We may not be able to change who our candidates are, but we can change how we interact with others. You can be the kind of person that is kind to your fellow American.  You can teach your children to see the good in everyone and not be a bully.  I concede, no one is perfect but I try very hard to see the person inside the body and not judge them on their color, religion or sexual orientation.  I have faced many challenges in my life but I am very lucky that I was born in America and have many people that lived before me to be thankful for. I try not to take for granted, all the freedoms I have today, for if I were born in another country, I may not be so lucky.

No one gets to choose where they are born, what color their skin is or what sex they are. We all have to make due with the cards we are dealt. If you aren’t happy with your life, only you have the power to change it.  Nothing worth having is easy,so put it all out there, make a new friend, take a class, learn to play the violin.  Life is short, leave your mark!

Jean Marie Stanberry

Author of : Laying Low in Hollywood, One World United, The Illusion of Order, Blood, Sweat and Fears and Heartless-A Star is Dead

jeanstanberry.com

Jean Marie Stanberry is an author for Kingsmuir Press and has also written many articles about her volunteer work for victims of drunk drivers with the Thompson fund and articles for skating websites and magazines.  As a RN volunteer for Canvasback Missions, canvasback.org she has seen the long term effects of the US nuclear testing on the people of the Marshall islands.  She is always looking for ways she can make the world a kinder and gentler place.