What's Wrong With US

I have lived in Detroit and its suburbs all my life. We are just across the river by tunnel or bridge from Windsor, Ontario. How can it be that we have ended up so very different from our neighbors to the north?

Every time I go to Canada it feels like I am going back in time. To America maybe 25 years ago. A slower and more deliberate place. A place where violence is rare and people are still polite to each other (for the most part). A place where it's okay to be different from everyone else.

Judging by the poll I have linked at the top, you'd think our two countries were from very different parts of the world. Most Americans don't even think that gays deserve civil unions let alone equal marriage rights. How did the Canadians get to be so kind hearted and open, while we have turned ever more insular and closed minded?

I think it all goes back to the 80's, when Mr. Reagan and his ilk took over in Washington and began to turn the country back to a simpler time, a time when there was them and there was us. A time when everyone knew their place and you didn't act or think differently from the mainstream (without some type of sanction). Ah, the good old days are here again.

The promise of the 60's and 70's was crushed by the Rev. Falwell's of the world. The closed minded and frightened individuals who could not understand what was happening around them. Who believed that the bible was unchanging and to be taken literally. Funny how they only pulled out certain parts to take literally, the rest just seems to have become a quaint historical reference for them. Yes, you can work on Sunday without being put to death nowadays.

It's not that I think the whole country has gone their way. If you look at the election results from the last two presidential elections and compare them to the elections in the 80's, you'll see that the country is evenly divided. In the 80's the Democrats lost big time, winning maybe a handful of states.

The biggest factor turning the country rightward is that they are much better organized. They have a machine in place. A mean-spirited, cold-hearted machine that holds the absolute truth up to all of us, waiting for us to believe.

The Democrats by their nature could never be as mean and manipulative as the Republicans. They believe in the future and in the innate goodness of mankind. Republicans fear the future and think that only by going back to the tried and true will this country become right again. Shades of 1984. We know what is best for you.

Sometimes I see the glass half full, sometimes I see it half empty, and sometimes I just want the glass to spill over. Maybe start a new America, without all the Puritanical baggage that we can never seem to get rid of.