Blog-detail - Project Orchard

The previous generations left you one of the most powerful, fertile nations on earth, with the ability to do amazing good, to end wars, to aid in crisis. Yet you used this might not to stand up for the weak, but to endorse the strong, to help the arms dealers and the resource exploiters, to fight against dictatorship when the fight served us, to support human rights when it was convenient for us to do so. You had respect. You were the envy across the globe. Now, you are resented. Now, you are seen as a bully. And to add insult to injury, you were warned, and did not listen. You chose to turn a blind eye and instead hear the placating of sycophants and promises of snake-oil salesman. Blind faith is the ultimate abdication of responsibility.

You had inherited an amazing education system capable of opening doors and unlocking potential. It is now in ruins, providing more burden rather than freedom. You had health care which was second to none, yet now is in major crisis, where the only winners are the drug companies and insurance companies. The infrastructure too was state of the art. Now bridges crumble, forests burn, and poison seeps into our water. All you had to do was vote with the people’s interest. But you deferred to the lobbyists, PACs and the biased pundits, the spin-meisters fashioning themselves as qualified experts in their field. If that is not abdication of responsibility, what is ?

They had left you the Statue of Liberty, encouraging hope to those approaching our shores. And you leave to the future: a Wall, radiating insecurity, desperately, futilely trying to dissuade the dream of living among you.

You inherited a vast land abundant with resources and you recklessly abused that gift on weapons and profits, killing hundreds of your own children in domestic mass shootings, killing thousands more children that you’ll never consider across the globe, and killing countless after that as you reap what’s been sowed in our planet. Yet you deny the need for gun control as well as the reality of Climate change. You are the center of technological innovation. You should be leading the fight against global warming, not willfully heralding its approach. Is there no end to your abdication of responsibility?

The forefathers had done all the heavy lifting,

all you had to do was to maintain the system by making RESPONSIBLE decisions, keeping in mind the values on which the American greatness was based. All you had to do was to make responsible decisions, by seeking the truth, recognizing the truth and making decisions for yourself. That was the responsibility you were assigned. You were afforded the education, the sources of information (Google) and most importantly the FREEDOM to make SMART decisions. But you took the easy way. You ABDICATED that responsibility.

• What were you thinking? Look what a mess you have left us in.
• So I ask again, how will we answer that question for our future generations?
• "Well, counselor," the judge would say, "despite the overwhelming evidence, it doesn’t help anyone to assign blame for past events. Case dismissed."
• Perhaps so, if America has truly abdicated its responsibility.
• I refuse to believe that. I like to think that it is a temporary lapse.

The true American spirit is that we are each entitled to make our own individual decision and when we screw up we own it. And because we have been blessed with the greatest of gifts, that of free choice and abundance of resources we have the capacity to redeem ourselves and right the wrongs that have been done.

And it is this American spirit that we should hang our hat on.