Since March this year, 2012 I have been pretty much on the road non stop through out America. Ultimately I will visit all 48 contiguous states. Hanging out a lot in truck stops and low budget motels, I have had a chance to meet a lot of very interesting people. My mission has been to answer one question, what do Americans really think about the condition of this nation. Eventually the results of my journeys will be available to the general public, but right now, as we approach this upcoming presidential election, I have decided to share some of what I have learned.

It is, of course no surprise to find out that the majority of Americans are really good, decent people just trying to survive difficult times. It is at times difficult to digest all the many ways people perceive the state of our nation and sometimes really surprising to realize how many have very extreme, radical views. It is also a major surprise for me to see how many's views are very regressive and based on little more than revisionist history which many only know in passing, and accept as truth with little or no actual time invested in learning the truth. Most alarming is realizing how successful those who use the "Big Lie Theory", have been and how it has shaped the beliefs of a small but vocal and aggressive number of Americans. The Big Lie Theory, utilized by many throughout history, but most infamously embraced by George Rommel of Hitlers inner circle, is the idea that if you tell really big, outrageous lies and keep repeating them no matter how often they are challenged or debunked, a sizable number of people will believe them and adopt them as unshakable truths. We can cite many examples throughout history in which this ploy was successfully used. Most pertinent to me was the lie that black people lack the intellectual capacity of non white people and therefore could not be taught difficult concepts, a lie I grew up with and spent my life trying to prove wrong. Even after 400 years there are those who still believe this lie is true. Ironically they are often the most intellectually challenged among us themselves. Grasping for straws my mother would say of them.

This past week I stood with a group of long haul truck drivers and we talked about the upcoming elections and who was telling the truth, and who was not. One pleasant surprise has been meeting more and more people who would normally be staunch conservatives, but yet have come to realize that the people who represent themselves as conservative, like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, are not actually conservative, instead using this designation as a smoke screen to get power with the real intent of subjugating the middle class, regardless of political beliefs. But I have also been shocked at the number of people who have been brainwashed into supporting policies that clearly will not benefit them.

 Last week during a spirited debate there was one man who aggressively supported the policies of Romney/Ryan. He had earlier told me he had lost everything in a divorce and was living in his truck. Credit trashed and unable to get a manufacturing job like the one he lost when his employer moved the jobs to Asia, he was convinced that his problems were the result of too many people dependent on the government for survival. He took special umbrage at my asserrtion that there was something wrong with attempting to limit the number of people eligible to vote, arguing that the founding fathers never believed in majority rule, that they wanted to limit the right to vote to citizens in good standing who were property owners. He felt we should return to this policy, because he favored making sure Whites remain in control in the face of the nations growing diversity, after all he said, without European influence there would be no America as we knew it. He was totally in denial regarding the fact that he, because he owned no property would not be able to vote insisting that if this were the policy of the land, what happened to him would not have been. He, like a surprising number of others I have met this year have no problem with limiting education, the better  jobs, retirement benefits, etc to the privileged few, apparently convinced that this group will include them. They argue the conservative line that this will guarantee stability and promote a strong and prosperous nation.
And the freeloaders will be better off because they will not have to deal with the illusion that they matter.

 Maybe they reason, they will even leave.

It is rare when these people outright admit this is what they believe, but it is clear when you listen carefully to what they are saying. As I have said, these people are in the minority, but they are aggressive and growing. And I pray that the rest of us will be diligent in making sure they don't get the America they want. Please vote.

It is time for the majority of Americans to recognize and accept one uncomfortable truth. There is a segment of our nation whose sense of entitlement and whose basic sense of greed is so pervasive that they will never be able to accept the majority of us as fellow Americans. You know who they are. You see them on TV talking about how lazy and despicable we are. They believe that the rest of us are parasites, and that no matter how hard we work, how decent and law abiding we are, no matter how much wealth we produce for them, that we are beneath them and they would never be able to see us as equals. This is not an issue of race, even though many of them try to convince us that it is. But those of us with wisdom understand that this is just a ploy to keep us from focusing on what the true issues are. Its not really an issue of religious beliefs, even though they exploit those differences for the sames reasons that they exploit racial differences, because in the end they believe we are not smart enough to recognize that nothing else matters to them but money and power.

We, the majority, the hard working and dedicated patriots of America must recognize

•  that they have no problem with sacrificing our children by sending them off to fight in foreign lands, often solely for the purpose of making it safer for them to get richer by exploiting those lands. 
• They have no problem with trying in every way possible to limit the rights of as many of us as possible to vote because they believe majority rule is equal to mob rule and that only they deserve to make decisions that impact what happens in America.
•  These people do not want a middle class because they believe the nation will be more stable when everyone other than this ruling class has to spend every working hour focused on survival, and helping to make them richer with our labor. 
• They do not believe the majority need quality educations beyond that necessary for us to be able to do the work they need us to do because they are sure knowledge leads to instability because the more we know about how things work, the more we think our families deserve more than they want to allow us to have and that has a detrimental effect on their profits and sense of stability.

 These people will never identify with you and I, which is why you hear them constantly saying that the government wants their money. They say, the government thinks their money belongs to them. They do not want you to realize that we are the government. The government of this nation will be whatever we allow it to be and this is exactly what this nations founding fathers wanted, for the government to be the way that average people counter the power of the unscrupulous and greedy. They do not want to admit that what they mean is that they do not want to share the great wealth they have acquired as a result of  all the hard work and contributions to this nation we all have made in so many ways over so many generations that made their success possible. They were like us at one time, but the richer some people get, the more they want to separate from the rest of us. Everyone wants to share misery, but beware of those who gain an advantage and become obsessed with exploiting that advantage no matter who it costs. And saddest of all are those who have little and are so totally brainwashed by the greedy that they actually defend them and advocate for them in a the misguided belief that this will somehow allow them to become rich and elite like them.

This is the America Thomas Jefferson worried might be. This is the America George Washington warned us about. Dwight Eisenhower spoke constantly about the need to make sure these people never are allowed to undermine the middle class. Abraham Lincoln went to war to stop the last major insurrection that was the result of this same idea of a "socially conservative America", which is code speak for a nation divided against it self and thereby easy to control.

There is a lot of advantage in growing up poor in a relatively small, segregated town. I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, on the East side of the tracks. That was how our world was divided. The East side is where you lived if you were black or Latino. The West side is where white people lived. Children are not born with prejudice, and because my mother, who I would come to understand had experienced much heart wrenching prejudice in her life was focused on earning Gods love, prejudice was not taught or passed to us in our house.

Next door to our small house was  the neighborhood grocery store. It was run by brother Amos, an aging man, huge, but gentle and loving. He always had his bible with him and everyone in the neighborhood knew if you needed something, he would find a way to help you. He felt being a Christian obliged you to feel that way. Brother Amos store is where in warm months, the elderly men of the neighborhood gathered to talk about the worlds issues. I was fascinated with sitting and listening to them, and only years later did I marvel at the fact that these men, who must have endured some amazing things in their time, never displayed anger or hate, but instead talked about hope and dreams and how things would not always be as they were.

For me, this was the last straw. I sat at the counter of a Denny's restaurant, eating chicken noodle soup as I watched Anderson Cooper on CNN. On the screen was a woman with blonde hair, flawlessly done, dressed in obviously expensive clothes and jewelry, pointing a well manicured finger at the screen as she went on and on about how too many people only want to sit around and live off the benefit of her taxes. She was so mean and so wrong in the way she made it sound like all poor people were just scum who did not deserve to live on the same earth with her.

All week I have listened to an ongoing diatribe from people attending the Republican convention accuse the poor and down trodden of being lazy and only wanting to live on welfare and to steal from them. I listened to  Anne Romney and her phony appeal to Americans to think she or her husband actually cared about us even as every other action by them clearly proved the opposite. Then we saw Paul Ryan give a speech that according to a Fox News correspondent seemed designed to set a new record for most lies in a single speech. Then came Mitt himself piling more lies on and promising exactly the opposite of what every thinking person knows is his real agenda. I've had it. Enough is enough.
My question is, where are the real people? Where are the people of integrity who despite their political or religious beliefs are loyal Americans first? When will enough be enough for the hard working honest people of this nation? What is more insulting to honest hard working people than to have an overdressed privileged bitch stand on television and accuse us of loving to sponge off her. It is easy to just say she just doesn't realize that its impossible to have any quality of life on welfare and food stamps, that very few people would choose welfare or food stamps over a decent job.

 Watching this woman reminded me of the woman my mother worked for when I was a child. My mother worked for several years for a family in Wichita Falls, Texas as a housekeeper. She nurtured their children, cooked their meals, cleaned their houses and  and provided support to this family in whatever way was asked of her without complaint. She made just barely subsistence level wages. She never took a dime from welfare, food stamps or any other government program and every day she got on that bus in time to have a hot meal on the table when I got home from school. Then one day the lady of the house became angry at my mother because she felt her children had begun to show more affection for my mother than for her, so to punish my mother she tells my mom that from that day on my mother must take her lunch break on the screened in porch where the family kept their dogs. Of course my mother quit, but she felt hurt and betrayed, and watching her cry is a memory I will never forget.
What is really crazy about all of this is that without the rest of us these rich, privileged people would not have their wealth and status. No matter how any successful person makes their money, they benefit from all of the things our society collectively provides. Even if you are on welfare, you spend that welfare money on food and supplies that these peoples businesses sell and even this pittance ends up back in the economy, circulating and contributing to the strength of our economic system. Consumers are two thirds of our nations Gross Domestic Product, without our spending we have a pitifully weak economy, that means every single one of us.
We all pay taxes that whether through the federal government, or through sales taxes and all other taxes and fees, make the roads possible for these superior people to be able to drive their expensive cars back and forth, for trucks to get their products to the places where they are sold. Our revenue provides the post office which allows them to send out bills and other correspondence more efficiently than any other such service on earth. We make the courts and police possible to protect their assets and give them a way to sue when a debt isn't paid to them. We, as a nation, from the very poorest among us to the wealthiest, collectively make this the best nation on earth to do business and we provide to the rich a quality of life unattainable anyplace else on earth so easily and with so many choices.

For these people, the ultra rich, to now point their fingers at us and accuse us of being the problem is amazingly foolish and short sighted. Even many Republicans of more sane times like Dwight Eisenhower and Henry Ford, knew that in order for the rich to thrive they must protect the rights of the middle class. But today's Republicans, led by right wing conservatives determined to return America to the stone ages socially are leading the greatest attack on Americas constitution ever in this nations history.  We must understand that what we are witnessing in America is no less than a coup attempt by ultra rich oligarchs who want to end majority rule in America. No matter how hard you find this to believe, it is exactly what is happening. Think about it; making it harder for people to vote, ending your rights to bargain collectively, dumbing down education while attempting to rewrite history. Whether they claim to be Republican or Libertarian, what they really want want is to drastically reduce or eliminate the governments as a way to take away your ability to have a say in running this country. And just as Hitler promised the German people peace and prosperity, so are today's far right extremists promising peace and prosperity through reverse social engineering that very few seem to understand can only destroy the ability of their children and grandchildren to live in a free nation and have any chance to improve their lot in life. It is exactly what a majority of the framers of America constitution feared most, and of which this nations foremost patriots from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, on down over history to even Republicans like Eisenhower warned us to be ever vigilant to make sure never happens. This is not the first time this element of our society has tried this; rigging the supreme court and attempting to buy and rig elections so that they could establish themselves as the ruling class of America, but never before has this nation been so vulnerable to this attack. The racial climate, the decision by the supreme court legitimizing Citizens United, and the attack of right wing Christians making the ridiculous assertion that God wants to us to turn our backs on the poor and needy while taking away the rights of anyone we choose to not like has put this nation on the edge of disaster. Why is it so hard to believe that the same people who ruthlessly pollute our environment, who foment wars to make it easier to exploit other nations, who ruthlessly wage war on your right to collectively bargain for decent wages and who move their money to off shore banks to make sure it cannot contribute to the vitality of the nation that made their wealth possible would plot to end majority rule, and once they have used you, will immediately move to make sure you can never make trouble again. It ought to be so obvious.
And now these people have become so bold that they accuse us of being responsible for the conditions their actions have put upon us. What kind of person moves jobs to whatever nation is cheapest, keeps their money out of circulation in our economy, pushes for policies that make it harder and harder to survive no matter how long and hard you work and then turns around and says that  you are the problem.