sigh

Just read this in an article:

A small news item from Tracy, Calif., caught my eye last week. Local station CBS 13 reported: “Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call 911 as many times as necessary. Or there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.”

Seriously, America is dead. If this is the future (and it is if Republican dreams come true) then we have ceased to be a society, and have become a nation of anarchists.
Rugged individualism is great, but a society, despite what conservatives like to delude themselves of, is a collective. It is a banding together of the members of that nation to improve the collective lot of all. Yes, sometimes the "undeserving" benefit from the hard work of others, but the same is true in any form of society.
We have more than enough money in this country, held most in a the hands of a few (who've engineered themselves into the position of being the only ones who benefited from the Bush years), but our "leadership" is either afraid to raise their taxes or owned by them outright. Never mind that taxes have been higher during the Clinton years, or much much higher during that Golden Age that so many would like to return to, the 50's (when, I might add, Republicans tried to cut military budgets, and it was Democrats who tended to get us into wars).
Our problem, in almost every issue in America, is not a lack of money, but a lack of will to spend it in a useful manner. How many billions are spent on elective plastic surgery, pet luxuries, fancy car wheels, single-use packaging, or ridiculous prepared foods (frozen oatmeal, anyone)?
sigh.
Oh well, that's it, I'm done ranting now. I dont know why I even bother, really. There's not much point in doing it, since the only difference anymore between how we get screwed seems to be that the Republicans do it harder and faster.
I've grown disheartened by what I see our "leaders" doing. Nothing seems to be done for anyone but the richest of us, and this is all justified by the idea that it's not right to take away "their" money, as if they had earned it all by their own labor.
I'm done with this place, it's dead at the roots, replaced with the Wild West and run my mental teenagers and sociopaths. If you care about your children, urge them to move to Europe, where they actually still believe in society. They may not have our Constitution, but that just means that no one can twist it around to suit their purposes.