The Twelve Sins

I am a proud American who has struggled for eight years to explain to my increasingly-cynical children why the sins of the current Administration are not reflective of the America worth loving.

It’s been tough. My 16 year-old son has lived 1/2 of his life under this regime. He’s seen me scream at the broadcasters and so-called “pundits” on CNN, Fox News, etc., more than once. He and my daughter have seen the despair in my face as I tried to explain “what’s-gone-wrong.” I’ve seen their brows darken during these conversations; I can literally see bitter cynicism baking in their brains as I talk with them.

Watching their patriotic beliefs shrivel, I’ve always rallied with, “But this is the country that saved the world from the Nazis! This is the country that first sent a man to the moon! This is the only country where any man or woman, of any background, can rise to leadership in any endeavor.”

Luckily we have the examples of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to point to, to illustrate the latter point. But the victories of WWII and the moonshot? Well, that’s dusty stuff to my teens.

Like me – maybe because of me – they are focused on what I’ve come to call the Twelve Sins of the Bush Administration.

1. The shredding of the Constitution;
2. The loss of our respectability and influence in the world;
3. The thoughtless decimation of our military;
4. The abuses of human rights, including the torture of war prisoners;
5. The exploitation and misuse of the intelligence community;
6. The 8-year arrogance of our foreign policy;
7. The purposeful erosion of America's middle class;
8. The back-breaking deficits resulting from Bush's illegal war;
9. The lack of oversight and the overt, illegal manipulation of federal agencies;
10. The profligate war profiteering of corporations that are connected to Bush and Cheney;
11. The short-sighted attacks on legitimate scientific endeavors; including,
12. Any meaningful plans to secure the world against the proven perils of global warming.

I once registered as a Republican so I could vote for McCain in the 2000 GOP primaries. Now I’d stop at nothing to quash his rise. To secure my kids’ future. To bring America back from the brink of irretrievable failure.

A world without the American example of days’ past would be a smaller world.

note: this catalog was helped along by reader comments I read recently at HuffPo.