If you want to live in the America you’ve heard about, you’ve got to start noticing what’s really happening. A democracy requires your attention and participation. Drollette has a few choice words for those who don’t understand that by many standard measures, we are a kind of banana republic. The comparisons have been made by others, with more facts and figures, but I like the wording here. The article is worth reading (actually the “Smirking Chimp” site, despite its dehumanizing name, has been picking up better and better articles over the last few months – check out the headlines on the right-hand menu).

The Mark Drolette: ‘What do you mean, it’s ‘like’ living in a Third World country?’ – Smirking Chimp

As the blistering is applied, one refrain is heard with regularity: “This is America, not some Third World country.”

Hmm. Well, when I think of a Third World country, I think of one where the already-filthy rich get much richer at the expense of the ever-poorer, where millions go without basic health care, where elections are fixed, where education becomes a privilege only for the privileged, where the environment is poisoned and plundered, where national debt is mega-astronomical, where women’s rights are under pressure, where government is corrupt and squarely in the filching hands of Big Business, where labor is vilified and oppressed, where civil liberties are stripped, where precious resources are thrown away on, oh, let’s say, bombs and tanks and ships and planes while its citizens go hungry…

And where the country’s leadership doesn’t care if its own people die. Not until, that is, the dying is done out in the open and is no longer out of the newspapers.

Some readers may know I’m planning to retire to Costa Rica next year, a country that carries Third World status. Costa Rica has national health care, a literacy rate in the mid-90s, clean water, safe food, a fine educational system, a quarter of its land dedicated to national parks, and no standing military. I’ve often mused how nice it would be if those things could be found in “advanced” America.

So who’s zooming who?

Many, if not most, of us who have been paying attention to America’s gradual (and intentional) dismantling over the last two decades, accelerating to warp-speed during King George’s reign, cannot be surprised at what’s happened in New Orleans and the Gulf States over the past week. Aghast, yes. Surprised, no.