State of our union is not strong at all
State of our union is not strong at all
The pomp and circumstance exhibited at the annual State of the Union Address is fakery. Members of Congress that despise the president and condemn him on the strongest terms are on their best behavior for an evening, appearing to be friendly, cordial and gracious. (The president does the same thing vis-a-vis the members of Congress that he detests.)
In his 2013 speech, President Obama uttered the immortal words we have heard from every president, “The state of our union is strong.” Is it?
We live in a highly-polarized country which is split right down the middle, one in which hundreds of thousands of citizens have responded to Mr. Obama’s election and re-election by expressing the desire for their states to secede from the union.
We have a debt of roughly $16.5 trillion, which has been brought to this point most recently by deficits in excess of $1 trillion per year for every year of President Obama’s service as the entitlement society nurtured by fake conservative George W. Bush has metastasized under our current leader.
The president and congress have been unable to tame stubborn unemployment and underemployment, which have battered middle class American families.
We have a dysfunctional government, a congress whose members’ priorities are to be re-elected and catering to moneyed special interests upon which the members bestow undue influence.
We are the most physically sick society in the world, and we consume the vast majority of the world’s dangerous, side effect-laden, symptom-treating drugs. Thousands and thousands suffer fatal overdoses each year as a result of “properly prescribed” pharmaceuticals. We are increasingly obese, lazy and isolated from human contact, eschewing exercise so that we may sit in front of some type of screen.
We are an increasingly coarse, crude and vulgar people, aided by music, radio, television, films and video games, which push the envelope more and more with the passage of time. Many, if not most of us, have a junk diet, filled with processed and “fast food,” fat, excess calories, sugars and salt, and many of us smoke and/or drink ourselves sick, boosting the cost of health care for all.
Newspapers and television have become places where various types of sexual intercourse enhancers are promoted, and print media promote “gentlemen’s clubs,” more accurately characterized as “strip clubs” (not places associated with “gentlemen” in the true sense of the word).
We are the most violent and heavily armed society in the world, something which, sadly, many have accepted, some telling us that unlike other amendments, the Second is subject to no restrictions or responsibilities.
I believe the case can be made that the state of our union is weak and breaking.
Oren Spiegler
Upper St. Clair