Editor's Note 4/5

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Apr 5, 2011

Are you angry? That’s a tough question to answer. Sometimes I feel like you should be and I should be. Other times I feel like that’s overreacting, that everything is actually going to be okay and the democratic process will work our country back into its former splendor. I think that maybe my daydreams of marching on Washington for change in this or that might be a little radical. But then again, history has a tendency to treat radicals kindly.

I guess to answer my own question, we have to know why we would be angry. First of all, we’re slowly having rights stripped from us in the name of safety. I don’t need to go into detail about the invasive TSA body scanners. It’s widely quoted, because it’s so appropriate, that Ben Franklin said those who sacrifice freedom for security will soon have neither. I’m going to go with Ben on this one. And airport security is just one recent example. In post 9/11 America, government can do a lot snooping around without our permission (remember the Patriot Act?).

Then there is the media. We should be furious with every major media outlet. Never mind the fact that Charlie Sheen is apparently more important “news” than the crisis in Japan; they are just plain not doing their jobs. Outlets on the left and the right of the political spectrum are the same: they turn two-party politics into a petty competition and fuel hate between the two sides when, in fact, the majority of Americans are about the same amount of moderate.

Once upon a time, it was a journalist’s job to call out the government’s misdoings. Freedom of the press exists for basically that purpose. Now it’s seemingly a journalist’s job to spin facts one way or the other and not touch anything that might make the government look too bad. Most major media condemn Julian Assange for his work with Wikileaks when 50 years ago, their job meant doing the same thing.

How about the staggering inequality in America? Our friends in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt got sick of it and did something about it. But point of interest: according to the CIA World Fact Book, those countries face less inequality than the United States (we rank as the 42nd most unequal country. Tunisia is 62nd, Egypt it 90th).

For some reason, gays still can’t marry. We’re still muddling about in other countries’ business when we have our own problems to solve. The partisan divide in Congress is forever widening and deepening.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more complaining that could be done, but I’ll spare you. Read a newspaper if you want more.

So the question still stands: Are you angry? If you’re not, should you be? Quite possibly. The time will come soon when we have to do something about it, like the protesters in Wisconsin (whether you agree with them or not, you have to admire the fact that they actually acted).

Don’t let the thought that nothing can go too wrong in our country stop you from seeing what’s going wrong right now.