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Too many vampires. Enough with the zombies already. We’ve had it up to here with werewolves and ghosts and other living dead. Come on now is anyone really scared by this played out shit anymore? It’s all fantasy and campfire stories trying to keep the kids from wandering off too far from the village at night. Only difference between now and three hundred years ago is our campfires aren’t in the wilderness. They’re all Megaplexes and flat screen TVs.

Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like back then. The world was flat and everything that went bump in the night was a major cause for alarm. Today we think we know everything. We’ve explored everything from the tip of Mt. Everest to the floor of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. We’ve created artificial sunlight to illuminate what’s beneath the bed and hidden in the back of our closets late at night.

Nothing frightens us for real anymore so we make up even more terrifying tales to watch in movies and television programs in order that we can still be afraid. We have an innate and primitive need to be scared. Dracula alone wont cut it anymore, so we’ve made entire armies of indestructible killing machines that come back from the future to destroy all of mankind. Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t phase us at all so instead we look far into the future to find aliens who have sulfuric acid for blood and gestate their young inside of human stomachs killing them when they hatch from their fleshy, blood spattered hosts.

We have come so many years away from the fear of a Nuclear Holocaust that it has completely slipped our collective mind. We Americans believe it’s our birthright to live in a world where we have no real fear. An occasional oil spill kills millions of fish and destroys a vital part of our country’s economy. Thousands of families are displaced and cities are completely destroyed by it. Three days later we’re worried about what some starlet of the moment is going to wear to the next award show and who’s going to be her date.

War has been going on for almost a decade and we have lost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. But it’s happening “over there somewhere” so we don’t have to think about it. As long as we have our cable TV and the Internet service is still working, there can’t be any real problems. Right?

Be afraid of the terrorists. Be afraid of people who don’t belong here. Be afraid of people who look different. Who believe in a different God. Who speak a different language and eat a different kind of food. “Trust me. I’m Patriotic! Can’t you see? I’m wearing my Flag Pin!”

So we tune in and listen to the hype we have been programmed to believe. We buy it wholesale. Hell, we buy it whether it’s on sale or not. We buy it as they keep bailing out the companies that spill the oil and prolong the wars. We buy it while they take more and more money away from our schools and healthcare. We buy it when they raise taxation and find more ways to eliminate representation.

They point over here at this “traitor” and that “anti-American” while hiding their gay lover in a locked closet or an airport bathroom stall. They scream about the evils of Marijuana while taking their spouses extra prescriptions of Valium and Percocet. Climbing high up to the mountaintop to preach about how much they worship the Constitution and adore the Founding Fathers while forcing teachers to give equal instruction time to Intelligent Design and attempting to pass laws justifying prayer in the schools.

We watch CNN broadcasts about the people uprising for freedom in Egypt and now much of the Middle East. All the while keeping ourselves in complete denial that the issues that the rebellions are all about over there are the very same things our government is attempting to slowly strip away from us over here. And we are letting them do it. As long as Starbucks and McDonalds stay open, we let them do it. As long as we can still watch the Real Housewives marathon, we let them do it. As long as Snookie is still getting drunk and touching the Situations Situation, we let them do it.

This used to be a country of possibility and potential. My greatest fear is that I have brought my children into the world at a time when that is coming to an end. I am part of the first generation in America’s history that is going to have it worse off than our parents did. College graduates can’t get jobs. Buying a house is near impossible for most of the population today. Selling one has become just as difficult. We are in the worst recession since the Great Depression, but we are not allowed to call it a Depression. That might make people scared.

We have access to the largest and fastest databases of information in the history of the world, and yet we have the worst quality of education of any modern nation. I don’t blame the teachers. I blame the system. Politicians continually say they want to improve our schools, and then turn around at the first chance they get and cut their budgets. They don’t tax the oil companies or the banks. They go after the schools. Why? Politicians have absolutely no vested interest in educating the public. The more educated the people are, the more difficult it is to fool them. Making it so Politicians can get away with less deception and misdirection.

I don’t want a government run healthcare system. I don’t think it will be efficient or necessarily responsible. But if Insurance companies actually provided coverage that they claimed so the enrollees were receiving the care that they paid for, we wouldn’t need Uncle Sam to step in. They don’t so we do. The concept of a free market economy is good. So was the concept of Communism. In theory they work perfectly and create a beautiful society where everyone thrives and can have a happy productive life. In the real world, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Need some examples? Look at Russia under Communism and look at America today.

The old phrase, “Those who have not learned their history are doomed to repeat it” seems to be applicable these days. Our culture not only ignores history, we refuse to acknowledge it at all. We allow our politicians to misquote and misrepresent history. They distort it and bend it to their own needs. They use quotes out of context and claim statements given by others to be their own when it suits them. They claim the people who created this nation to be of a specific faith and worship the same God that they do. When in fact the Founding Fathers were primarily Atheists who built this nation as a Plural society expressing the need to keep Church and State separate.

When will we as a nation recognize that we need to hold our representatives truly accountable to us? This government is meant to be Of the People, By the People and For the People. Not the major corporations with their lobbyists and greedy agendas. I’m not saying that we need to rise up in arms and shoot when we see the whites of their eyes, but there has to be a Revolution of Consciousness in this country at some point in the near future. We need to wake up from our video game comas and our texting dreams. It’s time to put down the remote and open up our eyes. For the majority of us, the status quo is not working. It may not have sharp fangs or bloody claws, but we definitely have much to be afraid of.

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