"wretched is the slavery where the law is changeable or uncertain"

These are the times we live in.
The time where free-men become slaves to an ideal, a concept separate from reality, one where a washer woman becomes an heiress, a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished.
A time when the middle class is tantamount to snake oil.
We have been duped by the salesmen, distracted by the spectacle and upon our return from the big show, we leave our fortunes to the gypsies who read our futures from a Monsanto Greenspan ball of tar sands oil.
We ignore the sages, the Krugmans's and scientists, in favor of the wizard and his dime store relics, that instill a sense of peace, we clutch tightly to our "live better, work union" buttons while the wizard sets our temples on fire.

This is the time in which we live.
The time in which we passively expire, while the dreams of our fathers are perverted by a global attack on intellect, simultaneously, grieving the future our children have come to accept as inevitable. A future in which we conform to a diety whose teachings only apply in theory. In practice we celebrate the individual and family, while denigrating the community.

We are enslaved by a nation too impoverished for change.

Where are the artists, who question the status quo?
We are silenced by the snookies, the Hiltons, the Honey Boo Boos.
We read US Weekly instead of Salman Rushdie.
Literature is being defined by edgy form rather than content.

And in this realm of freedom we become good Americans through conformity rather than dissent.
It is through discourse that this country's ideology was founded and it is through compliance that we fail.