I'm not sure why , and maybe I shouldn't , but compared to Chris and his family roots , I'm totally belittled , and feel like a complete novice in my Americanism . But let's read what he wrote about all this .
I'm not blind to the imperfections of this old America , or the failures to meet it's ideals consistently at home and abroad . I spent more than two years living in Roxbury , the inner city in Boston , across the street from a public housing project where I ran a small church as a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School . I saw institutional racism at work . I saw how banks , courts , dysfunctional schools , probation officers , broken homes , drug abuse , crime , and employers all conspired to make sure the poor remained poor . I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America , Africa , the middle East , and the Balkan . I saw there the crimes and injustices committed in our name and often with our support , whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation and armed forces . We had much to atone for , but still there was also much that was good , decent , and honorable in our country .
The country I live in today uses the same civic , patriotic , and historical language to describe itself , the same symbols and iconography , the same national myths , but only the shell remains . The America we celebrate is an illusion . America , the country of my birth , the country that formed and shaped me , the country of my father , my father's father , and his father's father , stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding , is so diminished as to be unrecognizable . I do not know if this America will return , even as I pray and work and strive for it's return .
Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs , corporations , and a narrow , selfish , political and economic elite . Cultures that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality die . The elites are blinded by absurd fantasies of omnipotence and power that is dooming our civilization. We are more and more resembling small developing third world countries as we have been steadily impoverished by our own power elites , legally , economically , spiritually , and politically .
We embrace the dangerous delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the world from itself , to impose our virtues on others , which we see as superior to all other virtues , and that we have a right to do this by force .
Excerpts and ideas from the book " Empire of illusion" by Chris Hedges , winner of the Pulitzer Price , my thanks as usual to my readers for their time .
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