America, Somehow, Surviving

FIFTY YEARS AGO everybody thought America was going to hell in a handbasket. The country was divided over the Viet Nam War, civil rights issues had folks out in the streets, all kinds of unrest and turmoil. I was just a kid, and utterly fascinated by it all. Keeping up with the weekly combat casualty list fronm Viet Nam was just another baseball related activity, which never failed to generate numbers, and never had an off season. American history strongly suggests that throughout it many if not most people believed that the U.S.A. was going to hell in a handbasket. It always seems to be. In 1967 I thought that by the year 2015 everybody on earth would either have starved to death, or would be living on Mars. I wasn't sure which. What impresses me now is that whereas America is still going to hell in a handbasket, and has been, seemingly, since time immemorial, it never seems to get there, and that might be a good thing. This crazy system we have now of somebody purchasing the American Presidency every four years for an ungodly amount of money is, well, incredible, and would be hard to believe if it weren't really happening. A relatively small group of hugely wealthy powerful corporations own and control just about everything in America, and yet we, the American people, seem largely unconcerned, as long as we get our crumbs. Obama paid a little over a billion per term, Hillary is promising to raise two point five billion, and Jeb Bush has over a hundred million as the starting point for his money race, and he hasn't even announced that he is running for president yet. The idea of actually doing something about this insanity doesn't seem to cross our collective consciousness. But, likely as not, it'll all get worked out, somehow...