We Are So Screwed; National Edition

75 years ago, FDR was inaugurated. In the midst of a world-wide depression, which militarists and fascists around the world seized on as a means to power, FDR did not move this nation down that road. In an environment of national panic, where banks were failing and huge numbers of people were out of work, in a nationwide radio address, he proclaimed that: "The only thing we have to fear is: Fear itself!"

Contrast that to now. After suffering one coordinated terrorist attack that killed about as many people as who die on the roads each month, the Bush Administration and virtually every Republican running for office since then has played up the fear card. "The Jihadists in caves are coming across the ocean to slaughter you in your beds and defile your daughters" crap. The Democrats rolled over and played dead on this for years, running in fear from the fear card. Hillary Clinton seized on the fear card and played it in Texas just before the primary yesterday.

I am not blaming Clinton. Politics is not a tea-party. She is in this contest to win and she is playing the game as it is played.

What I am saying is that, as a nation, we have turned, in less than a few decades, from a nation of people who endured the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the worst that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany could throw at us into a nation of quivering milquetoasts. We lived under the spectre of an all-out nuclear attack from the Soviet Union for 40 years. Other than a brief time of fear-mongering by the Right in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we didn't quail in fear as a people. But now, some guys, armed only with boxcutters, hijack four airplanes, fly three of them into buildings, and we are reduced to a nationwide mass of quivering jelly, just begging for a strong man (like, say, Vladimir Putin) to keep us safe. Doesn't matter if we have to throw away our most sacred freedoms and liberties, people say (and Republicans say specifically), just keep us safe.

We are no longer the people who defeated a world-wide empire to gain our freedom in one war and fought them to a stalemate in a second war to keep it.

We are no longer the people who, at great cost of blood, wiped out legal slavery within our borders.

We are no longer the people who twice send millions of soldiers to Europe to keep our friends free of conquest.

We are, as a nation, nothing more than a pack of quivering spineless cowards, howling for a strong man to keep us safe. One more good whack by the terrorists and we will gladly sacrifice everything that our forefathers held dear, everything that they, for generations, have fought and died for, just for the vague promise of safety. We are tottering on the brink, now, with an executive that has claimed the power to detain anyone it wants for however long it wants, without charges and then torture anyone it wants. We have an executive who has arrogated to himself the ability to wiretap anyone he wants to, Fourth Amendment be damned. And we have one political party which thinks that is all a good thing and another which is spineless to oppose it.

One good whack and we are no longer a free state.

You guys on the Right will have your precious firearms. But you will have nothing else, you will be the first group of armed slaves in human history. (And then they will take your guns, for who wants armed slaves?)

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow would seem to agree with me.