When I started off on my long journey in college, I knew "nought" what I would do with my life. I knew I loved Politics (yes with a big "P"), I knew I wanted to change the world. I realized I was fortunate enough to live in the United States, .... I, I, I! Now I am not so sure. My faith in this country's oldest constitution was fledgling, it has since slowed to a small trickle hardly worth any notoriety. Truth is: I'm uncertain as to what has happened to the America I believed in? I'm inclined to assume it may never have existed. There was a time when the words Amendments and Freedom caused a spark of patriotism to rush up your spine. Yet, now I am ashamed of myself, of this country, of what we have done. I am ashamed of my parent's, my journalists, my reporters, my teachers, my politicians, my friends, my family, the list goes on. Our failure is just that, "our" failure. We are all responsible and we will all pay the ultimate price if our great democracy falls, and the light that once shone so brightly, beckoning the world, becomes the dim night light of a bygone era.
Today the Supreme Court handed down a number of rulings, all of which worked to erode precedent decades in the making: Free speech, which once was herald as a right that did not "shed itself when a student walked through the doors of a public school," is now set back; School Integration is no longer a prime concern, when at one point we recognized that despite our best efforts some schools still stayed black while others stayed white (Meredith v. Jefferson changes some of this-the court decided the case: quotas are not permissible).
There are those who blame the homosexuals, the women who allegedly "destroy life," or the minorities who live in the slums they have been relegated to. But they blame others because it is always more difficult to blame oneself. Sadness is when the top stories of the day are a hot blonde's exit from prison after 23 days, condom use being manly,... the list goes on? We no longer wish to search inside of ourselves, rather, we seek solace in celebrity and frivolity. When John Stewart and Steven Colbert exude comic news that is more informative than a country's national news, we can clearly expound, "Houston we have problem!"
