Monday, December 1, 2014

Rage! Towering Rage!

Rage! Rage! Rage!

You see it everywhere.

You see it in the 2010 and 2014 midterm results.

You see it in the Tea Party rebellion.

You see it in a recent Gallup poll, which showed only 27% of working class Americans, non-college educated, 65% of the population, support President Obama.

You see in the white middle class, 75% of the population, who feel they have been thrown under the economic bus.

You see it among the young and healthy , who, in the quest for equal outcomes and wealth redistribution, feel abandoned, underemployed, with a bleak future, and left to pay for the old and sick.

You see it among American blacks and other American minorities, who feel unjustly disrespected, oppressed and left out of mainstream American life.

You see it in Senator Charles Schumer’s recent speech, where he said Democrats have placed their chips on the wrong thing, health reform for the few rather than the welfare of the many.

You see it among the Republicans, who have boiled with rage since 2010 when President Obama left them out of health law negotiations and rammed the health law down their throats.

You see it among critics of American foreign policy, who are outraged by our perceived weakness and appeasement of our enemies.

Something is badly wrong here. Americans feel it in their gut. They are acting with rage towards the Washington establishment and the armies of the status quo.

They want actions, corrections, and solutions, not words to calm their collective outrage.

Poets in the past have said it best.

Rage, rage against the dying of the night. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, 1952).

It looked as if a night of dark intent,

Was coming, and not only a night, an age

Someone had better be prepared for rage.


Robert Frost, Once by the Pacific, 1928

What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,

Awaked , should blow them into sevenfold rage,

And plunge us into flames.


John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667




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