How Can I Feel Proud?

How can I feel proud of my country right now?

Foreclosures hit 112%.

Greedy mortgage brokers, speculators, and builders inflated the market, targeted the "path of least resistance" by going after elderly and minority (mostly black women) borrowers.

We've been at war longer than my youngest daughter has been alive.

Missouri lost 10,000 jobs in the first quarter.

Wal*Mart announced plans to pull in those stimulus checks - "no fee" to cash the check and reduced prices on grocery staples - like we need to make the world's largest retailer and Chinese business partner any richer!

The media plays games with politics, sound bites, and people's emotions with everything.

Rev. Wright "controversy" hides the fact that white people (hello Pennsylvania) voted along racial and conservative religious lines but where is the outcry about that?

11 o'clock on Sunday morning is still the most racially divided and segregated hour in the country - when is the last time or any time a white person went to an all black pentecostal or Baptist church? Or when is the last time a black person went to an all white Presbyterian or Lutheran church? Come on people, wake up!

Racial division, class division is still alive and well in America. The have's have it and don't want to let it go! The have not's are just trying to survive.

Food prices, gas prices, mortgage crisis, no jobs, no loans, no health care - these are the issues that matter.

Marines are raping 14 year-old Japanese girls in Yokuska and Hiroshima and Okinawa! Should I be proud of those troops?

Big business has privatized prisons and have joined forces with law enforcement, teachers unions, and employers to create a perpetual underclass - cradle to prison population to keep rural America employed.

Italian, Irish, English flags can fly proudly on neighborhood homes but the minute the Black, African, or Caribbean country flags go up - the neighbors are outraged at the "angry black people." Go figure.

White girls, affluent white girls, in upstate New York are part of a middle school sex ring that gives oral sex to the boys in the bathroom - and the media portrays black and brown girls as wanton sex objects!

Big corporate conglomerates are "giving the people what they want" when in fact they are engaging in classic "push marketing" with the oversexed music and books purposely published and launched in black America. We don't want it and legitimate black literature can't get published in the big houses without sexing up the cover on the trades!

Texas polygamist ranches are engaged in incest and rape of 14 year old girls!

Gas is $3.59 a gallon in my St. Louis suburb!

A single mother, working hard, can't afford health care for her three teenagers.

One president was impeached for having oral sex with an intern...between him, his wife,and God...another president is still in office eight years later and hasn't been impeached for an illegal war, not one but three recessions (remember 2001, 2003, and now 2008), too close relationships with oil barons and gas prices are through the roof...shall I go on?

Sex on everything from cartoons to the news and we wonder why middle school kids are having it.

The government got rid of the Pell Grant and Ward Connerly and co-horts are trying to get rid of affirmative action in Missouri.

Forty years since Dr. King was assassinated and garbage workers in my little suburb are all black but the supervisors are all white.

And on, and on, and on...

And we wonder why the world doesn't like American government.

And we wonder why the world is ready for America to change.

And we wonder why the world thinks we are immoral, unethical, just plain wrong.

And we wonder why...

(sources: npr.org, cnn.com, nytimes.com, huffingtonpost.com)