It’s been a terrible week, and there are times when it makes us feel better just to vent, to get our anger and nasty thoughts down on “paper”—like in the olden days when we would spill out our venom in a letter, or more recently, an email, then never mail it. That’s what this post is.

We all remember the $10 million “Let them eat cake” Jeff Bezos wedding circus in Venice. Then, there’s Elon Musk, who has more money than one person should morally be allowed to have, because the rich have advantages and are taxed differently from the rest of us. IRS and CRA beat up on us ordinary taxpayers while the billionaires get tax breaks, government grants, stock market tips (insider trading), and contracts we can only dream of.

That all pales, however, when we’re confronted with the $5 billion dollars a day that the unwanted and unauthorized war on Iraq is costing the American taxpayer. While it is true that an evil regime rules Iran, that is moot when weighed against the innocent civilian losses and how much good those billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars could have done when applied to healthcare, education, feeding the poor, and lifting the disadvantaged from a life of despair, instead of killing people in a foreign land.

There are cancer patients, diabetics, and others with chronic illnesses unable to afford treatment, children going without food, people living on the streets, and countless other injustices in our society that are worsening while Nero fiddles. A war of even one month costs $150 billion dollars. Imagine what that money could do for those people who do not have the resources of members of Congress, Senators, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Donald Jr., and Eric Trump (Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee) who fiddle from their safe, ivory towers.

Both my husband and I have held jobs since we were teenagers. No family riches were handed to us to make life easier. We know how hard we had to work for what we have, and we certainly have more than so many others our age do. There are so many people, often through no fault of their own, who do not enjoy the comfortable retirement we have.

When I see rich politicians and incompetent hangers-on making disastrous decisions about how to spend billions of hard-earned tax dollars instead of making life better for those who need a helping hand, it makes my blood boil. Their blind lack of empathy, honesty, and integrity is mind-boggling. The rich elite and the politicians have no understanding of how difficult it is to choose between buying groceries and filling the tank with gas to get to a job or paying for medical treatment.

The fat-cat politicians still get paid while the very government employees they oversee are being denied weekly paycheques during the current shutdown. Kudos to Delta Airlines for removing the step-to-the-front-of-the-line advantages they once gave to members of Congress and government officials. I hope it remains in place after the shutdown ends. Multi-million dollar weddings, multi-billion dollar useless wars, and cutting off life support to people in need are beyond unforgivable; it’s immoral and should be criminal, not that the current American administration has any morals, or respect for the law.

The families of those in power are fattening their own bank accounts, servicing their personal wealth, creating destruction, mindlessly breaking the law, and obfuscating their own role of serving the needs of the people. At what point was it deemed acceptable for the government representatives to determine that they were on board with drinking the Kool-Aid?

What is it going to take for this madness to stop? How long will it take for those in power to allow the United States to self-destruct, and take the rest of the world and its global economy with it? I’m a helpless baby boomer observing this unbelievable shit show from the sidelines in Canada. Every day brings new horrors with no end in sight. We have all had enough already and hope for a SuperMan or SuperWoman to fly in and save us? Should we call on the women of Iceland who saved their country from destruction by the patriarchy and its mismanagement a few years ago?

There! I’ve said what I had to say, and I can honestly say I do not feel better. I’m reminded of that horrific scene in Apocolypse Now when Robert Duval’s character leads the American military in napalming a Vietnamese village of civilians, accompanied by Louis Armstrong singing a discordant “What A Wonderful World“. We do NOT love the smell of napalm in the morning. How much longer will the rest of the world allow this to go on, and when will sanity, justice, and kindness return to our disintegrating, mad, mad, mad world?