Why, Wondering About Ten Years of Demise

I was sipping my morning coffee and thinking about the events of Connecticut and what happened to our country in the last decade.  Why?

The unanswered questions behind why Michigan has worked overtime in a lame duck session to not only bust up unions but to also invade women's bodies, destroy civil rights, and condemn millions of their population to poverty.

Guns, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation - all weapons of fear used to control the population, either those in rural areas who are undereducated and tied to religious dogma or those in cities who are struggling to live full lives where employers (now considered "alive") work overtime to leave them penniless.

Is it just greed?  Is it just power?  Is it just control?

Why?

I remember a time when one could work and care for their family and not worry about having to work 60 hours a week just to make ends meet - and this on a full-time job.

When I graduated from the University of Iowa with my MBA, there were rumors about all the hours that brand managers had to work, but the perk was the pay and the benefits.  I didn't have to work those insane hours because I chose what I was informed was a family friendly company where the marketing manager himself left religiously at 5:30pm every day so he could be with his family.  It turned out this company also laid people off left and right.

Why?

Is power so much of an addiction that the corporations want to control everything.  What have unions done to take away their profit margins?  The black president did not take away their guns or their ability to make money, health care has not destroyed their ability to turn a profit.  They made themselves human through Citizens United and then worked overtime to buy elections, destroy homes, and demonize teachers.

What has happened to this country in this decade and what can we do to get back to normal?

A man or woman should be able to work at something that enlightens them and be able to provide for themselves without selling their soul to an entity.  The fast food workers in New  York stood up and demanded their right to humanity.  The right to collectively bargain and meet together is why the corpocracy kept slaves uneducated and frightened, what kept it going through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era and now with immigrants, fear used to control.

What can we do?

We can not turn back the clock, but surely there are enough of us that are more than the Koch Brothers who are destroying the nation.

We will not be slaves again.  To guns. To NRA. To Citizens United. To Fear. To The Koch Brothers. To the GOP. Never again.