What happened?

To this country? How have things gotten to the point they are at currently? Are we experiencing another Great Depression? I know that each political party likes to blame the other, but their has to be more to it than that. We've been in a decline for a long time. Not just economically. Crime is up, homelessness is up, drug use it up. Education is no longer a priority, public safety is no longer at the top of the list. In fact, the two seem to be the first things to go when money becomes an issue.

Seems to me like we have our priorities a bit fucked up don't we? We spend more money fixing a country we destroyed than we do taking care of our own. We can ship 20,000 troops to the dessert, but couldn't seem to evacuate a city after a hurricane.

I've tried to figure out when exactly it was that things started heading south. Some people like to blame the lack of religion in schools and all that. I think it has more to do with political correctness and lack of personal responsibility. We started punishing the strong and protecting the weak and stupid. We have "no cut" sports teams. "No loser" tournaments. Some teams have the "everyone will play" rule. If you run a billion dollar corporation into the ground, don't worry, you'll still get your bonus and a nice bail out from the tax payers.

It's even worse than that is some areas. Here, criminals know that they can do pretty much what ever they want and if the police bother to investigate and they happen to get caught, they'll only spend a few hours in jail anyway. If crime has no punishment, the criminals have no deterrent yet society says we can't just shoot them. We get punished for protecting ourselves and criminals win lawsuits when they get hurt breaking into someones house. You go to jail longer for not paying taxes than you do for rape. Something seriously wrong with that.

We don't seem to care about education any more, walmart is Chinas number one importer and the largest retail chain in this country. We don't make anything in America any more. I doubt more than a quarter of population could feed, cloth and house themselves with electricity and a supermarket down the road. I have to wonder what it's going to be like in another 10 or 15 years. We seem to get fatter and dumber every year. My only hope is that I can make a difference in the lives of my children and keep them from following the same pattern. My goal is to educate them enough to be able to think for themselves and question everything.