Beyond Bleak

"Stay upbeat!" the physical therapists keep telling me. That's why they took away my iPad. Constant monitoring of the news was so depressing me that my rehabilitation was lagging; the muscles that need to be re-educated to operate my new titanium hip were failing kindergarten.

Something like that.

The surgeon assures me I'll "be 100 per cent by November." Great. Just in time for the mid-term elections. Stay upbeat?

Rand Paul? Joe Barton? Sharron Angle? Stay upbeat?

You're risking death by commando attack if you board a ship to bring humanitarian relief to the suffering people of Gaza! Stay upbeat?

The raw petroleum gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and the flood of toxic chemicals being used to disperse it, are lethal to every form of life in the sea, and the marshes that adjoin it. Nobody in government or the extraction industry -- comprising some of the fattest corporate fat cats in the history of money -- has the foggiest notion what to do about it. The top boss of BP, whose well is killing everything, appears before Congress playing the Billy Martin role in the old beer commercial: "I didn't punch that dogie." Then BP ships him off to its executive penal colony on a remote island -- which you can bet is somewhere in the Pacific. Stay upbeat?

Our greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression is met with great gifts of taxpayer cash to the very Too Big to Fail financial institutions whose idiocy caused the crisis. More and more Americans lose their jobs but the band aid of extended unemployment benefits is stricken by a corporate-owned Senate that can't bear to pay for public works by raising corporate taxes almost to the same level that is imposed on working Americans. More and more Americans lose their homes to foreclosure but we let financial industry lobbyists write the new "regulations" on lenders. Stay upbeat?

The insurance industry that has befouled health care in the United States, now among the worst in the industrialized world, writes the foundation of "health care reform" legislation with the result that the one part of the system that worked -- Medicare -- is at risk from the predations of the newly-empowered insurers. Stay upbeat?

Even as apocalypse envelopes the sea, the corporations that own Congress , now sanctified with Constitutional personhood by the Gang of Five on the Supreme Court, are pressing for more drilling, more mining, more mountaintop removal, more gouging, more criminal exploitation of public land, even if it defiles historical, aesthetic and cultural landmarks that can never be replaced or repaired. Stay upbeat?

Video made from a military helicopter shows criminal assassination of unarmed civilians by United States forces in Afghanistan. When it's made public by Wikileaks -- an online journal of truth that deserves a Nobel Prize -- the United States responds not with outrage about the crime, but by jailing the buck private who is alleged to have leaked the thing in an act of conscience. Stay upbeat?

A White House that promised transparency, reform and war on government by Beltway insiders has given us more secrecy, a worsening of the executive abuses of the previous administration, and endless war against people who are guilty only of hating us, with reason. Stay upbeat?

And the current occupant of the White House, Dr. Kidglove, gives us . . . words. There are words and there are words. Words that inspire action and determination (Lincoln, Churchill, King . . .). Words of deceit, denial, duplicity and compromise. Stay upbeat?

I wonder if that Utah firing squad moonlights for the terminally depressed.