NanceRants - and she is one PISSED-OFF citizen!

NanceGreggs

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Sat Apr-15-06 06:16 PM
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NanceRants - and she is one PISSED-OFF citizen!

NanceRants – and she is one pissed-off Citizen!

By Nancy Greggs

Like many of us, I am in a perpetual state of anger these days. Between the mess in Iraq, the saber-rattling with Iran, the lobbyist scandals, the deficit, the outsourcing of jobs, the price of gas, and a buffoon of a president who thinks breaking the law is job one, it’s hard not to be pissed-off on a minute-to-minute basis.

Hey, there’s probably stuff going on that would really set me off, if I even knew about it. But these days, with new revelations about the criminality of this Administration coming at us on a daily basis, it’s hard to keep up without a Goddamned scorecard.

But then there’s always that one little thing that gets on your last nerve, and this week my personal rocket’s red glare was set off by a remark made by Antonin Scalia when he was asked about the Bush v Gore decision, the stolen 2000 election. His response: “Get over it!”

I have heard that phrase once too often, and it sticks in my craw like the “Love it or leave it” bullsh*t I heard in the ‘sixties, a virtual dismissive wave of the hand that says I have no voice, no power, no say. Well, you’ve picked on the wrong citizen if you think I will shut my mouth, or be relegated to talking to that arrogant hand.

I am an American. That may not mean much to people like Scalia, but it means something to me. And when someone tampers with my country’s voting process, or anything else that impinges on the democracy of MY COUNTRY, I am not going to GET OVER IT, now or ever.

I am an American. I will not be dismissed, minimalized or marginalized, especially by hypocrites like Scalia et al, who persist in throwing rocks at my patriotism from inside their glass houses.

I will not be preached to by warmongering pseudo-Christians; I will not be reminded of the importance of family values by people who have no values at all. I will not be lied to, stolen from, manipulated. I will not be assuaged by meaningless rhetoric; I will not be lectured on the topic of honesty by people who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it walked up to them on the street and bit them in the ass.

I will not be condescended to by people who are as immoral as they are greedy and self-serving. I will not be shooed away from the adult dinner table like an ignorant child, while the alleged grown-ups plot the destruction of my own nation, or the nations of others. I will not be told to remain silent in the face of wrongdoing. I will not relinquish a single freedom that is my birthright as an American.

And no, I WILL NOT GET OVER IT.

When my fellow citizens are suffering, I will speak out for them, and stand with them. When disaster strikes, I will not GET OVER IT by going shopping, or attending a birthday party, or catching a ballgame. REAL AMERICANS don’t do things like that – and besides, it seems pretty obvious that those jobs are already taken.

REAL AMERICANS do not need to be told how to act, or how to react. We know what needs to be done, and we do it every time. Within minutes of the 9/11 attack, firefighters, police officers, and emergency workers were on the scene. They risked their lives to save others without hesitation. Not one of them walked away in an attempt to GET OVER IT. And dare I say it? Not one of them found it necessary to stop and read The Pet Goat in its entirety before springing into action.

REAL AMERICANS don’t condone torture, secret prisons, or rendition. REAL AMERICANS don’t look at photographs from Abu Ghraib and GET OVER IT. REAL AMERICANS don’t watch footage of dead Iraqi children on the nightly news and GET OVER IT. REAL AMERICANS don’t read about their soldiers being wounded and killed in an ill-disguised attempt to put MONEY into the pockets of the rich and the powerful and GET OVER IT.

This Administration, and the elected officials who support it, have brazenly picked a fight with myself and my fellow citizens. Wrong move, wrong crowd. They obviously don’t know who they’re up against. You see, real Americans don’t GET OVER IT when it’s their own country under siege. They don’t kneel, they don’t bow, they don’t yield.

The American people are now standing knee-deep in a foul-smelling liquid. They know what it looks like, what it smells like; they KNOW what it is. So stop telling us it’s raining. Stop trotting yourselves out into the public square with your half-truths and your spin. We all know the emperor has no clothes; don’t insult our intelligence with grandiose descriptions of his wardrobe.

I know this Administration and its party just LOVE throwing those bumper-sticker slogans around. Well, here’s one for them to chew on: “Eventually, everything comes out in the wash.” And I’ll be damned if I’m going to watch all of that dirty Republican laundry get hung on the line, and be told to GET OVER IT.

There will be a backlash to the corruption and incompetence of this regime, of that I have no doubt. Poll numbers for the current crop of Republicans are plummeting faster than the average American’s savings account. I guess all of those angry citizens who have been keeping tabs on where their country is being led just aren’t GETTING OVER IT either.

So to the people in power who have turned my country into something to be scorned rather than admired, to be feared rather than respected, to be a harbinger of hate, violence and death the world over, I say this: You are going down. Your support is dwindling, your lies are being exposed, and your failures are as glaringly visible as a fireworks display on the 4th of July.

And if you find that upsetting, well, hey … GET OVER IT!