Wave yuh Flag, Flag, Flag....(Celebration Time)

Great thinkers have taught us that the first step at solving any problem is recognizing that there is one. This last weekend was spent in an exercise of celebration and euphoria so extravagant and over the top it was borderline obscene, yet in its wake we have been left with nothing of substance, no questions answered, nothing like a plan for our future as a nation or how do we even survive the next fifty years whole and in tact and yet no one, not the pennant and mini flag peddlers, nor any of the overnight patriots and new found zealots could explain to me what all the celebrating was for.

Yes we're fifty years old. I daresay we're not fifty because of us but in spite of us and against all odds. During the course of those fifty years we have had two overt and bloody attempts to overturn our democracy and countless other covert ones whose facts and fictions will never make the news. Our business community remain among the most rapacious on the planet reaping huge profits and squirreling away the gains to tax free jurisdictions even as our people are among the most poorly paid. Profiteering and gouging ought to be the worst of practices but here they are among the least offensive. In a nation where an insurance company could rip off the public to the tune of billions of dollars without consequence to man, club or industry, and despite nothing changing to prevent it recurring, we watch as our traditions bow as their friends and former employees on both sides of the political fence fight to be the ones to open the treasury and pay it back. Our media is so compromised that what little news we do get we take with a pinch of salt; the people for the most part rely and place more of their faith in over the fence gossip over anything said at news-time. We still do not live like one people despite the best attempts of the cell phone ads, and even our willingness to sway our hips and sing along to the hypnotic and hopeful croon of David Rudder's 'Ganges and the Nile' it remains clear here by our voting habits and employment practices, emphasized by the ingrained negativity and demonstrable racism that permeates every aspect of our lives that if anywhere we can be sure that here those two icons can never meet.

Our people have been subjugated, put down and preyed upon without let up from time immemorial, and if somehow the symbolism of exchanging one flag for another was supposed to herald in a new day of freedom then please tell me where, because I can't see it. If we are to get anywhere then at some point we are going to have to grow up and deal with not just these but all of our national lies. We cannot sit idly by while the government of the day populates state positions with men of questionable characters and ignoble designs simply because those who went before may have done so as well. If no man can ever rise higher than the vision he carries of himself in his own mind then surely we as a nation are going nowhere. We should have been celebrating universal health care among the best in the world, not a system so deplorable many think of our hospitals as a place to go to die. Yes we keep saying that our education system is producing functional illiterates and we need to keep saying it until that changes. Until then what is there to celebrate? We should have established a quality of life that mirrored the ideals of our national anthem where every creed and race could find an equal place but instead we are carving up the nation into gated communities, ghettoes and no-fly zones. We've allowed smart men, bag men and crooks to rob us, milk us, rape us and ride. We've allowed ourselves to be conned into believing that as others were doing it it was okay for us to do it to. It's not. Fifty years later there should have been more to celebrate than that.