Death is not arbitrary.

The epitome, the definition and the shadow of this country lies in something so banal that it is both shallow and core-deep.  Something sickening, yet laughable; a line that was once drawn has become its own outline.

The news wants to know, "What grade do you give Obama in his first 100 days?"

We have killed millions of innocent people in our history.  We have killed 600,000 of our own population in a war against ourselves.  We treated a portion of our own people as though they were property, and have still not fully abdicated ourselves of that crime, hundreds of years later.  We have done so many other horrible things that may or may not be justified, and I say 'We', because it is the legacy we have inherited, and it is the responsibility placed on each subsequent generation. 

The stark violence of reality and of history is lost on the rose-colored lenses that Americans have been raised to adopt.  The corpulence that shows in our bloodlust, the detatchment with which we allow a relative few to hold the banners of our many... these contradicting elements have become the only kinds synergistic qualities that we recognize.

And so, we use only the most pedantic floodgate controls to gauge ourselves.  Is it because we cannot bear to confront that reality, and are afraid to accept the truth?

Or is it that we have become our own pedantic escapism?  How can we say that we are anything but our own slaves, bound to disunion and misanthropy?

To be an American is to be forever disappointed in the Human species.  To be Human is to recognize the fatal flaw in contemporary American thought.  The instant you let go of ignorance and shelter, you see just how scorched every landscape is, and how empty the fields inbetween are.

And in that shallowness, I see the arbtrary lines that an entire population uses to help themselves forget.  What would you grade such a country at?