By Carrie Louise Nutt –

The America I grew up in is not the America of today. This is always true. Life is constantly changing. The world is constantly changing. Nothing stays the same. It’s one big ball of organic aliveness. But the difference is that the America of today is not an improvement over the America I grew up in. It’s an America infested with religious fundamentalism and corrupted by greed.

This is not nostalgia. It’s an honest look at what has happened to this country since 9/11 and the Dark Ages of the Bush Era. The current epoch—whatever we want to call it (I’m calling it Post Post 9/11)—is characterized by a recession so severe some have dared to call it a depression, accompanied by the rise of the Billionaire Class and the funneling of money from the masses up to a small, extremely wealthy elite, creating a wealth disparity that has witnessed the near obliteration of the middle class. Americans in droves are suffering now as a result of the Bush-era policies. A malaise has set in. Americans do not feel that help is on the way or that anyone in places of power is advocating on their behalf. Public services have deteriorated, food prices and rents have risen, wages have stagnated, and health costs have buried people.

But that’s not all. The Dark Ages of the Bush Era aren’t confined to the economy, they also shaped the national psychology, still reeling from the divisive politics of that period, the brutal acts committed in our name and the dark manipulations of the George W. Bush administration or the “ends justify the means,” as Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney was quoted as saying. It was an era of paranoia, of spying, of torture, and of lies and we cowered through it, traumatized by the attacks of 9/11.

Trumping Trauma

9/11 was—without a doubt—a culturally traumatic event. At no other time in American history has there been a televised attack on the United States, and most certainly not on the mainland, using our own airplanes to fly into our most iconic buildings. Americans were more than rattled by the events on that day; they were traumatized by it, but the trauma didn’t stop with the 9/11 attackers (who were mostly Saudi Arabian—including Osama Bin Laden himself—but absolutely no Iraqis and no Afghanis were on that flight, nor were those countries behind the orchestration of 9/11). The attack on that infamous morning of September 11, 2001 was a wound that split open the national body, but that wound wasn’t cauterized or stitched and healed, it was pried open and the bloodletting began.

In other words, the Bush administration used 9/11 to justify the ends, which was getting to Iraq and over throwing Saddam Hussein, securing oil interests in the region, capitalizing on the disaster and earning more money for the private interests pulling the strings at the White House. It was a win/win for the Bush cronies, but a big goose egg for the American people. They used 9/11 to take our country into Iraq and spurned international support to do so. They abandoned the hunt for Bin Laden—enemy number one—in order to capture and execute Saddam Hussein. Two leaders, incidentally, in two completely separate countries (they don’t even share a border) with religious beliefs that make them antagonistic to each other, but that didn’t stop “news sources” like Fox News from confusing the two in the minds of Americans. What a load of chicanery. It’s no wonder that as Americans start to lift their heads up, they feel a rush of conflicted emotions, but perhaps what they feel most acutely is anger.

But whom should Americans be angry at? The Republicans would like Americans to blame Obama for their current economic woes, but that isn’t being honest about the economic actions that brought us to our knees. The first, and most obvious, big drain on the American economy was (and continues to be) the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. These were billed as necessary to keep the homeland—and the world, by extension—safe. The concept of a safe world is one that most people can get behind. The problem is waging war to create peace is like having sex for virginity. It just doesn’t work.

Unelected President

George W. Bush, if you remember, inherited the position of President of the Oval Office from Bill Clinton, who, during his presidency was able to balance the federal budget, even create a surplus, after Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush drove it into the red. This is not about partisan politics, this is just what happened—Reagan and H.W. created a deficit, Clinton balanced it, and W. drove us deeply into debt again. Us, of course, are the American people. Bush even went so far as to sell our bonds, US treasury bonds, to the Chinese in order to get more money to continue his selfishly motivated excursions into the Middle East. Bonds that today threaten to collapse the American economy, should the Chinese wish to cash them out. Fortunately, there seems to be consensus that the Chinese wouldn’t want to push our economy completely over the edge, as they still depend on us to buy their goods. If, however, another country could replace us as world consumers, well, then, that’s a game changer. But so far, we’re okay.

Is it the fault of the American people that the Bush Administration ran wild? I want to remind my readers that Bush was not elected President his first term. His run against future Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore, was left up to the Supreme Court to decide. The close election was orchestrated through voter fraud committed by the Bush camp, including letters sent to African Americans telling them they weren’t allowed to vote, jury-rigged voting machines, butterfly ballots, push polling and even disappearing bags of votes (in the case of Florida, Jeb Bush’s state, in case you forgot). There has been so much cheating in the Bush Camp that corruption was almost completely normalized. Chief executive of Diebold, Walden O’Dell, unabashedly promised he was, “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.” Diebold voting machines, by the way, were designed to favor Bush with prompts that made a voter second-guess their choice of candidate, if Bush was not selected. So, here’s this President, who cheated his way into the Oval Office, and faced with one of the biggest crises in modern American history, and what does he do? He drags America into the Dark Ages.

Unwilling Sociopathy

We could not have known what was in store for us, but we could have done differently, had we not been so confused and upset by the attacks (read: traumatized). We let our guard down and the Bush cronies took advantage. Had a kinder, gentler, less sociopathic President sat in office, we might have made steps against Saudi Arabia, but we did not, and we still have not. We could have used the support of the international community to get to Bin Laden. We didn’t have to kill and maim Afghanis, and especially not Iraqis, to get him. We didn’t have to go to war against “Terrorism,” a term so vague, it presents the possibility of endless war. We just had to follow the money trail. Without money, no organization can flourish. Had we worked in cooperation with the rest of the world—who were sympathetic toward us at the time—we could have created a real coalition, instead of the “coalition of the willing.” But the Bush Administration would not have it. Bush infamously said: “You are either for or against us.” In retrospect, it seems possible that Bush and his cronies knew from the beginning that they would prematurely leave Afghanistan for Iraq.

Osama Bin Laden is dead. That much we know to be true, but it wasn’t the Bush administration who brought him to justice (although I dare say death on the battlefield was justice.) It was the following administration—the Obama administration—that used a small, elite force to assassinate Bin Laden. Not drones bombing wedding parties or scores of young men being humiliated and tortured. These violent actions against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq only created misery and even greater hatred toward the United States. 9/11, after all, had a lot to do with anger about our policies in the Middle East. The CIA has a term for it, it’s called “blowback.”

Generation Cynic

Our policies in other countries have consequences for us—whether we are aware of them or not. In the case of the Middle East, our continued support of Israel has sown much hatred toward us. More specifically for Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden’s home, the opulence and freedom of the monarchy juxtaposed against the repression and suffering of the masses has created a real loathing of the United States because of our continued support of the ruling family: the house of Saad. Bin Laden said in reference to his intentions toward the United States that he was going to “cut off the head off of the snake.” Bush, of course told us, that Bin Laden “hated freedom.” The over simplification and dishonesty of this phrase is shocking, unless you hear it over and over again, and then it just starts to sound real, even normal. Fox News was infamous for spouting this nonsense, including mixing together the names Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, which is laughable now, but at the time, people believed they were in league together. And this was coming straight of the White House. Lies. Lies. And more lies. In comes Generation Cynic.

We also learned, during the Dark Ages of the Bush Era, that torture was no longer torture. Alberto Gonzales, who had been—like Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld—a member of H.W. Bush’s Administration, literally tortured the Geneva Convention’s definition of torture in order to, well, torture. Gonzalez wrote in a memorandum to W. Bush, “the nature of the new war … renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” The Geneva Convention was put in place to create rules of engagement for war. After World War II, it was decided by the people who came before us, who lived through the hell of it, that there should be some ground rules, like Don’t torture. The minute one party breaks this rule, everyone can, and some will, which means no one’s prisoner of war is safe; this is why you don’t break this rule to, ultimately, keep your military men and women safe from this kind of abuse. Never mind that torture has proven to be an unreliable source of information. But the Bush Administration wasn’t interested in fair play or in what was right for the American people in the armed services or at home or in the efficacy of its policies.

Chicago Style No Bid Contracts

What is interesting to note about the Bush Administration is that key members of it were students of the Chicago School of Economics or were heavily influenced by it. These dubbed “neocons” or New Conservatives subscribe to the Chicago School, infamous for its ruthless laissez-faire capitalism. The two most famous teachers were economist Milton Friedman and philosopher Leo Strauss. These men, essentially, advocated for profit considerations above all else—in other words, laissez-faire economics. (read: no regulation.) This means that human considerations, like what happens to the American population if you drive the economy into the ditch, is not as important as whether or not the decision lines the pockets of the private business holder.

And those private business holders, by the way, are not you or me (i.e. average Joe or Jane). The private business holders are the CEOs of companies like Halliburton, a company Cheney held stock in at the time of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a company given a no bid contract to “rebuild” the devastated countries. A no bid contract, by the way, is a where you don’t take cost estimates from a handful of reputable companies, like in a competitive market, you instead hand the job to a company of your choice. This opens the door for corruption and cronyism. Like, for example, Halliburton losing $6.7 billion—let me repeat that billion—dollars in cash off of one of its loading docks within a dozen hours of our money’s arrival in Iraq. Oops. Disasters, as Naomi Klein points out in her book, Disaster Capitalism, can make people a lot of money. Cleaning up after a disaster, whether man made or natural, is Big Business.

Bathtub Sociopathy

I want to return to the idea of sociopathic. To operate by the bottom dollar alone, without consideration for the welfare of the people who put you into power, is sociopathic. It lacks empathy and even consideration for the repercussions of your actions, but the Bush administration behaved as if they either didn’t care or were above repercussion, and so far, they have been able to commit atrocities in the name of the American people and walk away without being held accountable. Grover Norquist, another neocon, was quoted in 2004 as saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The best way to prove the inadequacy of government to the American people, after all, is to make it inadequate. But if that happens, if the neocons in power continue to defund the government and deregulate the stop-gaps our forefathers put into place to protect against the obscene accumulation of wealth, the American people will find their quality of life nose-diving straight into wicked bad. We are a community, above all else, and so, to consider only the bottom dollar—to accumulate at the expense of others—is sociopathic.

Consider the 2008 Subprime Mortgage Crisis. That ugly mess that tanked our economy—and the world economy, by extension. This could not have happened if regulations were in place. There was no regulation to stop banks from lending to people who couldn’t afford it. These risky loans are called subprime loans and they are the reason we are living through one of the worst economic crises in American history. It made the CEOs and the bankers gambling in derivatives rich, or in some cases simply richer, but it was at the expense of the American people, not only individually, but as an entire nation. Bush did not turn around and demand regulation of the derivatives market after this. Instead, he handed the CEOs of companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup—the same banks responsible for the subprime crisis— trillions of dollars of bailout money and those same CEOs pocketed the money in the form of million dollar, plus, bonuses for themselves. No one—not the Bush administration and not the CEOs of the banks—helped the masses of Americans going belly up and without a roof over their heads. It was the death knell for hope as the top 1% raided our national coffers and Congress did nothing to stop it.

Yes, We Can Gamble

It’s not a surprise that Obama was elected president on slogans like, “Hope,” and “Yes, we can.” In 2010, Obama struck back against the 1% when he signed the Dodd-Frank Act, which saw to it that banks, if they chose to participate in risky lending practices, would not be bailed out again by the American government; in other words, don’t go to Vegas expecting to be repaid. However, when the House passed its most recent spending plan—a plan that had to be passed to avert another government shut down—it included a provision penned by …wait for it… Citigroup. Forbes published an article shortly after the plan passed in December 2014 that pretty much nailed it. Author Steve Denny wrote, “The provision enables the big banks once again to use insured deposits and other taxpayer subsidies and guarantees to gamble in the derivatives markets—the very type of business that drove the 2008 financial crisis and the economic devastation that followed.” This kind of risky gambling nearly ruined us once. It’s anti-social to pursue the same lending practices knowing the negative impact of them. This is, essentially, robbing the poor to feed the rich.

Thomas Jefferson—a Founding Father, a Deist and an Enlightenment Thinker—was quoted as saying, “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property..[a] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.” Jefferson understood that the suffering of mankind arose from the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. There will always be people who are richer—the haves—and people who are poorer—the have nots. To keep a healthy society, however, the trick is to keep the two extremes between the have and have nots within a reasonable distance from each other. A sociopath hell bent on profit at any cost will not regulate itself.

Omission Accomplished

In May 2003, when Bush announced those infamous words “Mission Accomplished” on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, he hadn’t brought Bin Laden to justice; he hadn’t even found Bin Laden. He hadn’t, in other words, accomplished anything. This whole charade would be laughable, if people hadn’t died, and if it hadn’t made an already inflamed region into an even larger hot bed of brutal violence. Bush announced, “Mission Accomplished,” so he could leave for Iraq. It was a sham of a piece of spectacle meant to distract us, and in the Spin Zone, it worked.

As it is oft quoted, a saying that no doubt came about because someone learned an important lesson: War must be the last resort. It is too brutal and destructive to be first. Not only for the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children that have been killed in our name in the Middle East, but also for the American lives that been affected by our depressed economy; for the servicemen and women who have died and their families and friends that feel that loss; and for mentally, emotionally and physically wounded veterans potentially needing care for the rest of their lives. For all of these reasons, war should be last.

Bush and his administration, however, did not consider war a last resort. They went to it first. On September 13th —just two days after 9/11— Bush was already beating the drums for war, saying, “We will find those who did this, we will smoke them out of their holes, we will get them running, and we will bring them to justice.” Military invasion of Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and killing innocent people only created more jihadists and increased the amount of money flooding in to support violent acts against the “infidels.” It’s not hindsight, it’s “blowback.”

Patriotic Godly Blowback

The term “terrorist” doesn’t help either. It doesn’t elucidate the motivation for violence toward the West. If we pretend that “terrorists” are people who “hate freedom,” we will never really be able to “fight terrorism.” If we plan to protect ourselves from harm, which I presume most people are in favor of, we need to know not only who is doing it, but, in addition, we need to know why. Once we understand the root causes of “blowback” we can employ a targeted strategy against it. Currently, interestingly enough, there is a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia by family members of 9/11 victims. No doubt because these people were so desperate to understand the reason for their loved one’s death, they have been driven to uncover the truth, and have landed on Saudi Arabia’s front step.

Bush led us into a decade of very dark years. The country became more religious, more patriotic and less tolerant. Up rose a new kind of venomous talking head, the Bill O’Reilly’s and Anne Coulter’s, who screamed and yelled to prove their point, instead of relying upon knowledge or skills of debate. Might made right. Through this landscape of frothing talking heads and misinformation from the White House, what was true and real was difficult for many to decipher. This bred cynicism. Fox, for instance, came out with “Fair and Balanced” and the “No-spin Zone” to make their style of “reporting” seem objective, but under the head of the capitalist Rupert Murdoch, news is about what makes money, not about objectivity or truth.

“God” suddenly sprang up all over speeches of politicians. God bless the United States. “God” was used as a kind of scepter of right. As the small war the Bush administration promised the American people turned out to be two wars that had no end, and the truth about the torture committed in our name appeared before us in the form of grotesque photos, we sought a justification and fell back on “god.” God is a dangerous idea to fall back on, one of the reasons, perhaps, that our Founding Fathers called for the separation of church and state. Any suffering or pain you want to visit upon another can easily be justified when “god” is on your side. It makes you unquestioningly right in your actions.

After 9/11, Jerry Falwell infamously told Pat Robertson—two prominent evangelicals in fundamentalist Christianity—”The abortionists have got to bear some burden for [9/11] because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” This kind of religious fundamentalism is just a mouthpiece for hate but, unfortunately, 9/11 opened the door for this kind of bigotry. People were desperate for someone or something to hold accountable. People wanted to hear that they were right. Justified. They were vulnerable to the idea of “God is on my side.”

Fundamental Fellowship

Bin Laden’s interest in religious extremism no doubt came through his exposure to The Muslim Brotherhood. Although the Brotherhood, had its roots in Egypt—at least one of the 9/11 bombers was Egyptian—it took hold strongly in Saudi Arabia. With Saudi princes and princesses flying around on jets and shopping in European countries and enjoying all the freedoms of the West, while the rest of the country suffered in abject poverty under the veil, it is no surprise that resentment matured and gave birth to religious extremism.

Here, in the United States, we’ve witnessed the rise of religious fundamentalism. We now have the Tea Party, a party filled with religious ideologues, in mainstream Republican politics. Godliness, according to these fundamentalists means, among other things, honoring God’s hierarchy of being—first there is Man, he is closet to God, and then Woman, who is subservient to Man, and then Children to their parents, and then the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air and so on, to Mankind. In this vision of America, Man has dominion over Woman, which means Woman is less.

Never mind that the Bible was written by ignorant sheepherders 2,000 years ago. Details like facts are not important in belief. Regardless of what specialists in the arenas of science and medicine are telling us, for instance, about abortion, the fundamentalists are focused on throwing intense energy at all levels of the state and federal government to strip women of their access to safe and affordable healthcare. They’ve even gone so far as in the State of Mississippi to criminalize miscarriages. Mississippi can do this because the definition of “life” is no longer informed by science in this state, but by religious dictates, which have to do with feeling, not fact. The fetus inside any pregnant woman in Mississippi, if miscarried, can now be represented by the state against that mother. Religious extremists in this country have contempt for this very foundation of our American identity. They want “god’s law” to set the rules for the citizenry of this country, regardless of the unconstitutionality of it.

Militarized Mentality

After 9/11 a real lock-step mentality took hold and was even encouraged. Those who didn’t tow-the-line were at threat of losing personal or professional standing for being “UnAmerican.” Bill Maher, for instance, lost his job in 2002 for suggesting that the 9/11 attackers were not cowards. This simple and accurate observation lost him his job on his much-lauded show Politically Incorrect, a show whose title suggests what content might follow, but during the Dark Ages of the Bush Era, criticism of the President and his decisions was not tolerated. The reality that Maher lost his job became an example of how important it was to tow-the-line and offer no voice of dissent. Being American became defined as pro-war and with unquestioning allegiance to the Commander in Chief. One might describe this as a militarized mentality.

Prior to 9/11, however, this kind of “patriotic censorship”—which is a strange concept, when you think about it, as censorship of freedom of speech is anything but patriotic—was rare, perhaps the last time this kind of fervor ran through the US was during McCarthyism, that other surveillance-heavy, paranoid period in our history. After 9/11, however, this kind of censorship was par for the course. It took Americans a long time to stop fearing politics or anything political or to feel stable enough, to get enough distance, to begin to see what the Dark Ages of the Bush Era has wrought. Bush himself played the religion card. “God Bless America,” became his signature sign off and the rest of the nation followed, lock step. Politicians started wearing US flags on their lapels and making utterances to god at the end of their statements.

The idea of “god and government” is a separation our Founding Fathers were clear about. Freedom of religion means that the government of this country cannot dictate religion to the American people. We are free to worship—or not worship—as we choose. It’s not the business of the State. The State, for instance, doesn’t mandate affiliation with a church to marry two consenting adults. People in this country are free to celebrate their union of love according to whatever beliefs, rituals or traditions they want, as long as no one is harmed. This insistence on the separation of church and state rose out of the experiences these colonists had with the British empire, where the church of England, allowed to run rampant by the institution of the British monarchy, made all sorts of demands, restrictions and edicts that impinged on the personal freedoms of the subjects of that state. Separation of church and state is one of America’s most important, defining doctrines. It is the one that keeps any one religion or religious sect’s particular interpretation of “god” from becoming the gold standard by which all people must live.

Conforming to Natural Diversity

It’s true, many of our Founding Fathers were Christians, but they were a mixture of different interpretations of Christianity, including Deists, like Thomas Paine, who rejected the notion of religion in favor of observation of the world to evidence a creator. That’s about as liberal an interpretation of “god” as it gets. But this point of view doesn’t account for the slaves of African descent and the American Indians. Slavery, for instance, was legal in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776, and the American Indians, of course, predated the Europeans of Christian belief. America was pagan and brown before it was Christian and white. But, above all us, beyond personal religious belief, our Founding Fathers were Enlightenment Thinkers, meaning, they said things like, “We the people are created equal” and all men are entitled to the “pursuit of happiness” and that “freedom of religion” is necessary to protect people from tyranny.

This idea that we should all believe and think, and even look, the same way is antithetical to life. Look around and what you see contradicts the possibility of conformity to a norm. The bigger question is not what a person believes or how they look, but whether they’re a good person. Tolerance means the ability to tolerate the natural diversity in the world—from people that believe in fairies to aliens to God to Vishnu to absolutely nothing. There are as many different ways to “believe” as there are people. It really is a beautiful thing, but it doesn’t belong in our government.

Mental Monoculture: Diversity Weeded Out

Americans were not ready for the beheading of Nick Berg or the resilience of the Taliban. We grew up being taught torture was wrong; we knew it was wrong as the photos of Arab men in orange jumpsuits with electrical cords tied to their genitalia hit the pages of the major newspapers. We knew all the media was coming through the White House and that we weren’t getting the full story on what was happening, but we wanted justice for 9/11, an act that made us witness fellow Americans leaping from the burning inferno of the towers to their deaths. We grew more politically conservative in this country after 9/11.

We witnessed the rise of a new breed of “reporter”—the screaming, venomous talking heads who didn’t care about the truth; they wanted ratings. Those who spoke softly or articulately were drowned out by those who yelled and screamed. Truth became a thing in flux. Fact was eroded. O’Reilly was literally caught rewriting the Malmedy Massacre, as committed by Americans against Germans in order to justify his support of killing Iraqis. It was just the opposite, Germans shot Americans, but this didn’t matter. Not in the era of spin, a kind of day-to-day assault by the Bush Administration on the American people.

So, if we weren’t struggling enough with having a terrible wake up call about the impact of our policies in other areas of the world, we were now in the Spin Zone. And this made Americans even more hysterical and even less effective at engaging politically. Add in the “Protest Zones” and mass arrests of anyone who tried to protest the Republican war machine and free speech was effectively shut down. In New York, at the 2003 Republican Party Convention, peaceful protesters were swept up in buses and held in makeshift jails.

Rejecting Dysfunctional Co-Dependency

Looking back on it, we made it through, but we sacrificed a lot of personal freedoms and our constitutional rights in the process and we tanked our economy. Perhaps it is guilt that is straining the American people, and not anger. As I look around, I am finally beginning to see a response to all of this by the American people, with the protests at WalMart and McDonald’s, the Occupy movement, to the Ferguson protests, all of this seems to be the beginnings of the masses reawakening to this new America. We can never go back. Trying to make the world how it used to be is like throwing punches at the wind. Life moves forward. It’s one big organic alive ball. And no one is ultimately in charge. We are all part of this revolving madness. There are no guarantees. It is up to us to keep watch and to exercise our political muscles if we want to live in a society under a system with leaders who represent with integrity the needs of the citizenry, instead of a government filled with greedy public servants.

I know things weren’t so great when I was growing up. The once-powerful unions had all but withered and died by the ‘80s, when Reagan finally hammered the coffin shut on bargaining power for the employees. The neocons had already made inroads into government, so perhaps I am guilty of that hallowed tradition of nostalgia, but I know that somehow, after getting distance from the Dark Ages of the Bush Era, I feel no nostalgia for that time, and having lived through it personally, I am bearing witness to what I saw change, for better or for worse. There is no guarantee that in our time we will progress versus regress. It’s up to us to be the watch dogs who insure that the lessons of the past are applied to the present. We must be ever vigilant.

When you consider the psychology of a nation that went through a manipulative relationship such as we had during the Dark Ages of the Bush Era, it’s not surprising that we are filled with anger. When a President announces that you are “for or against us,” it sets a tone. It divides a country, down political lines, and this ultimately is destructive to the unity of a nation. What’s important is what we hand to the next generation of young Americans.

With all that said, Post Post 9/11 is a hopeful time, as the conservatism and fear of the Dark Ages of Bush Era starts to finally seem like a distant nightmare. It’s time for new legislation and regulation to improve the lives of the American people. It begins with the minimum wage, that’s for sure. But where will that money come from? It’s time to Tax the Rich.

Carrie Louise Nutt, a playwright who has experienced America from Seattle to New York and places between, is now a yoga guru in Los Angeles.