A good reading of Sunday’s news and I have decided that America is like a big old frat house after a three-day party celebrating freedom. The place has been trashed. The neighbors are angry, the building is on fire in a three-alarmer and the conservative leaders want to sit down and discuss formulating a fire drill and maybe buying some hand-held extinguishers.
We let the founding oligarchs convince us that a minimally regulated capitalism was just another word for democracy and freedom and then left the thing untended until it got so lopsided we had no means of righting it. We determined a policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs and then found ourselves dependent up to our ears in international trade with bloodthirsty pirates with whom we then waged unafforable wars. We put public funds into health research and then allowed private entrepreneurs to create monopolies out of the results and price the population out of the use of them.
Worst of all, we let those guys hornwoggle us into thinking that a representative republic was handier than a true democracy and then make the resultant bunch of demigods self-regulating and unrestrained by any real protection against corruption.
If we think we can buy our way out of this with money confiscated from the pockets of the common people that in increasing numbers have none, we are negligent in both our respect for the common welfare and our command of simple arithmetic.
Harold R. Pettus
Everett
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