These days I sit down to blog and my mind boggles. The Catholics have taken over women’s health care and make the evangelicals look reasonable these days. The 1% keeps taking and taking and taking and taking. Kids (actual children) shoot one another dead regularly. People would rather look green than actually be green (check out this from Freakonomics Radio—reality mimics South Park). And a Mormon (seriously: secret underwear, baptizing the already dead, big love) is running for president. And Sarah Palin still gets media attention. Women are sluts if they use birth control. Rush Limbaugh still has a job. Homeless people are 4G Hotspots, and people are shocked, SHOCKED that Goldman Sachs has no soul. The Afghani’s can’t believe one of our soldiers would snap and kill a bunch of them. People dare to judge and convict a soldier who has been on FOUR tours in what? Six years? Ten years? Does it matter? The guy snapped. In case no one has noticed, soldiers are snapping like brittle bones—I would. Wouldn’t you?
So much to rant about, I cannot decide. Like I have one foot nailed to the floor, I keep spinning: I’ll blog about this! No! I’ll blog about that! No. Yes. No. Wait. This. No, that! Spin, spin, spin, spin. Around I go, absolutely flabberghasted that it (and by it I mean absolutely everything) is completely and utterly fubarred. What good will it do for me to rant? I’m a small, though very indignant, voice. Seriously, my impulse it to grab people by their shirt collars and just slap them silly. Slap! Slap! Slap! Wake up! Grow up! Get a conscience! Stop the wanton arrogance. Take responsibility. Stop trying to be a Rock Star. Stop imitating Snooki. Think for yourself. Man up. Stop driving, walking, running, like you are the ONLY person in the world that matters. Have patience. Keep your eyes in your own damn campfire. Worry less about what I do in the bedroom (and on the couch, and in the kitchen, and over the washing machine) and more about why you’ve been married five times. Our children will soon be eating “pink slime” meat for school lunch, and pizza sauce is a vegetable.
The. Mind. Boggles.
We are, to appropriate a phrase from a friend, standing on our heads in shit. We are on a down escalator and riding it all the way back to Cotton Mather and his merry gang of bro’sters. (Yeah, I mixed that metaphor but good). What’s next? As many have pointed out, our country is beginning to resemble the landscape in Margaret Atwood’s chilling The Handmaid’s Tale.
I feel all self-righteous hammering out my anger, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying “you sound just like your grandmother, afraid of change and unwilling to embrace progress.” But when progress looks like this, I don’t want to keep moving forward.
Pamela Helberg 
Well said. You've put into just a few paragraphs so much of what's wrong with the world. It's funny when we just become numb to it all. Sure I've been hearing about the birth control debate… Those crazy religious institutions. Whatever, I'm barely listening. Then I see on the Today Show that the state of Arizona wants to require women to prove they're taking the pill for health reasons, and that non-religious employers want to limit coverage of the pill as well. I know I'm late to the party, but WTF? Is it more of an outrage to think that companies just want to save money in this way, or that they really think they have the right to force women not to protect themselves and the WORLD from unwanted pregancies?
Meanwhile, there's the whole Viagra issue. You can bet there'd be free birth control if men got pregnant. And abortions. It takes two to make a baby but somehow all the responsibility and blame get foisted upon the women. Just insane.