obviously

We are down here near the water for the 4th of July. We saw some fireworks, ate some burgers and dogs and even watch families run relay races carrying eggs on a spoon. It couldn't have been more All-American.

Yet, today, being on vacation I had time to read most of the Sunday paper. I read how Americans have been unwisely using up oil since 1973 when the price started to rise. I read that job security has almost totally vanished in this country for almost everyone. That came as a result of the capitalism that also gives a chance to everyone to become wildly wealthy.

I read how global warming is causing extreme weather, and that is leading to crop shortages, and that already has led to wars, which will get worse in the future. I also read about how our health care system is a mess, and the only real way out will be to get a single-payer national system.

These things are obvious, and they all have been for at least twenty years, most for forty years.

What is also obvious, is that we are still spending billions of dollars to send young men across the world to kill people they don't know, for reasons that are unclear.

But it's tough to change things here in America, as it is anywhere else in the world.

Despite all of our freedoms, which are many, and which should not be taken for granted. It is certainly true that living conditions are certainly better and more free than they were two-hundred years ago. But one thing has not changed: people with money and power will not give those things up easily, despite how unjust the conditions that their holding on to their means of acquiring that wealth might cause. Just look at how difficult it was to get rid of slavery.

As one soldier fighting in Afghanistan was quoted as saying: "It's been true for thousands of years: old, rich, powerful men talk tough -- young, poor, strong boys die."