Why are Americans so angry?

I wonder if part of the reason we are so angry is that we want everything to be fixed, and fixed NOW! Also, part of the reason may be that we are so used to the adreneline rush that comes from getting angry, that we simply don’t know any other way.
I used to read Ron Paul’s writings, but I have discovered that he tends to wander all over the place — guess it comes with getting older 🙂
~EdT.

Polimom, thanks for the link as it reminded me why I think Ron Paul is a political charlatan. He just doesn’t get it.
You probably aren’t surprised that I disagree with his reasoning but not that the problem exists. I’d like to give a few ideas as to the growing anger:
Taxes are paid by the top 50% moneymakers. Well, there 50% of the people not happy there. This is a VERY powerful group to be ticked off and they exert their anger in ways not as obvious as others.
Major parts of the bottom 50% are mad because they were raised to believe they were “owed” something. As Heinlein said, “When the monkeys learn they can vote themselves bananas, they’ll never climb a tree again.”
In building the “welfare state,” we stole from them the hope of owning a home, of wanting an education, of participating in the American dream; and replaced it with free meagerness.
Additionally, people are multifaceted. There are many groups within the 100% that the other two groups total.
It doesn’t matter if the far left like it or not, this is a fact: This nation was founded on Christian values and the vast majority being of that faith. This group however didn’t want to make the mistakes of the British and so many European nations by forming a “church-state” because they saw how it was being misused.
But they didn’t pay attention to their history. What is so ironic is the reason the great European nations moved into the Christian “church state” wasn’t a super evangelical event but a defense of the continued onslaught of another “church state,” the Islamic “church states.” More than just the “Little Ice Age” caused Europe’s Dark Age. If you’ll check, while Europe may have been ‘dark,’ Islam was VERY bright, and moving into Europe, pressuring the nations in Europe to accept Islam.
Now you see the irony. Centuries after European nations were forced to form “church states” in response to the incursion of the Muslims, we find Western Civilization once again being encroached on by Islam, a religion that at it’s core, does not believe in a division in church and state. As a matter of fact, they can’t be righteous in the eyes of Allah if the government of the country they occupy does NOT follow the Prophet’s Laws.
In light of this, the United States finds itself with no central religious base as it has had in the past. The U.S. is now in a post-Christian area, the majority of its citizens no longer of the Christian faith. So there’s a Christian group, potentially very large, that feels pressure and anger. Then there are those that somehow don’t see Islam as a threat that are upset with this “superstitious” group of Christians.
And so it goes – one group against the other, pricking each other to anger the other. Take humor. So much of it is no longer funny to a major part of the nation. When they turn on the Comedy Channel, Christians are faced with more blue words comedy than Blue Collar. People who feel like they have a legitimate belief have painful barbs thrown at them by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as if they were in junior high and were being picked on by the class bully. And if they don’t watch, which most don’t, they see them on other programming, including the news.
It’s not funny anymore and the left wing thinks it’s a blast to keep on pricking, thumbing, and talking down to a group of people that’s had just about all that type of conduct they can stand. They would NOT let in happen in person to them, and these “comedians” have pushed, pushed, and pushed until a lot of people feel their back against the wall.
This nation is being held together by a little love and Band-Aids and too many people are picking at the scab.
I have to go to work, but let me put in a little something from Teddy Roosevelt in 1915.
… There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.

Teddy, there’s nothing left in this country to pull it together and the hyphens out.
Sincerely,
Laz

Lazarus – the way I read European history, the reason that countries there had official religions was that they all started out as monarchies – most of whom were associated with the old Roman Empire, where Christianity was a capital offense until the time of the Emperor Constantine, at which point it became the law of the land. Kings were God’s civil authority, while the holy orders provided the spiritual authority. It was the tension between these two groups that led to things like the Church of England (Henry VIII in a spat with the then-Pope over a divorce), various revolts, and eventually the decision in the USofA that this whole idea of an official state religion (most of Europe was either Catholic or Lutheran, with England being Anglican) wasn’t something they wanted to carry over into our system.
~EdT.

Ed T – You’re skipping over more a century in there. That’s because you only read the “Western” account of history. There is no “Dark Ages” as “Western” history calls them in the Arab history. In their history, it is the Age of Enlightenment when they spread the Word of The Prophet to most of the known world. They also advanced the math and sciences by leaps during that period building on the knowledge held in desert writtings believed to be akin to the Royal Library of Alexandria. Look up the word “algebra” sometime and then start going over all the other terms of math and science. Christianity was, more or less, a convenient way to find a rallying point for the feudal system. That’s why no one really took the Papacy seriously and Popes were run in and out like so many cattle threw a chute. Oddly, the Catholic Church history, as it’s been opened up today, is one of the best ways to verify Arab/Islam history.

Lazarus – actually, I *have* read the parts about the rise of Islamic civilization. The timeframe I was talking about occurred before then, as in “the latter days of the Roman Empire.” After Rome fell, Europe mostly became a feudal, backwater mess of city-states (this is the “Dark Ages” I was speaking of), during which time Islam rose to prominence and managed to conquer a fair amount of Europe – and they weren’t kicked out until around the late 1400s. However – and this was the point I was trying to make – the idea of Christianity as an “official state religion” began a long time before Mohammed and Islam came on the scene – and in fact it was the continuation of a policy of having such a “state religion” that existed during much of the time the Roman Empire existed.
~EdT.