Consider this my Howard Beale moment, minus the trench coat and the rain-soaked image of a beggar with his arms outstretched, beseeching TV viewers to get up—to sit up—and go to their windows; to open them and stick their heads out and yell: I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!
Imagine the sound of this chorus of the sick and tired, whose words precede the clap of thunder and coincide with a cascade of water, transforming the avenues and alleyways—the streets and sidewalks, too—of our cities into the southernmost region of Canaan: an area doomed not because of what it has done to itself but damned by what we have allowed others to do to us.
Fear not, then, a downpour of fire and brimstone, because our end will be slow but not torturous. We have the chance to choose—now is the time for choosing—regarding whether we will be accomplices to our own destruction or guardian angels against the greed of government and the gluttony of corporations.
Now is the time to ask what many of us have been too afraid to say and too accommodating to question: What am I—what are we—paying for?
Where is the value in the taxes we must pay and the fees companies assume we will never not pay? To whom do we owe the honor of driving on broken roads and the horror of sending our children to bankrupt schools? How much longer must we stand in line—for everything—only to discover we cannot trust the news or travel somewhere new without having workers herd us like sheep and seat us like prisoners?
I am, in short, sick and tired of being sick and tired.
I am sick of being deemed too deplorable to be heard, while I am tired of hearing how much more I should pay for so little from a state government controlled by one party and online stores run by a few parties.
I want greatness from the country I love—and goods worth my money from brands that should otherwise go out of business.
Give us what we deserve.