When we first see Washington DC in all its splendor, decorated with Corinthian-column-lined federal buildings and hundreds of American flags, flapping wildly in the breeze, we are swept away with awe. We fail to see what this glory masks: a breeding ground for greed, fraud, ignorance, and capitalism run amuck. Many Americans don’t see the corruption in our government simply because they wish to pretend it doesn’t exist. In spite of their ignorance, the fact remains that under George W. Bush, the government has become a catastrophic mess that no longer cares about the welfare of the world or even of its own people.

Throughout the world, the word “America” has become synonymous with greed, arrogance, and ignorance. Disgruntled citizens in Europe burn American flags in protest rallies. Starving children in Africa and their dying parents, stricken with HIV, cry out for our help only to be answered with silence. Middle-Eastern people merely want America to butt out of their business. President Bush’s complete disrespect for the wishes of the world’s peoples and international law, particularly the Geneva Convention, has turned the rest of the world against him. Rather than eliminating terrorism and anti-American sentiments, Bush has created them where they didn’t exist in the first place.

America has become the bully of the schoolyard that is the world, shaking hapless children upside down to get lunch-money out of their pockets, beating up weak nerds and making them give him their chocolate milk, their oil. He is an arrogant jerk, the one who sits in the back of the classroom flicking spitballs at the poor teacher who doesn’t notice as they become stuck in her silver hair. She is too busy writing math equations on the board. America thinks that he rules the school, when in reality the other children have had enough of his tyranny and are all bent on his destruction.

In addition to his disregard for the needs of the world, Bush has systematically ignored the needs of his own people and pushed his extreme agenda into effect so that it is just below the radar of the average American. He is full of stealth and makes a habit of continually bending the truth and sticking so firmly to his lies that they become an alternate reality in his mind. He convinced the American populace that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were being housed in Iraq for the purpose of harming the United States. However, no matter how many times he claimed it was true, his conclusion that these supposed WMDs existed had no legitimate evidence to support it. This has been revealed by the fact that in nearly three years of war, no WMDs have been found. So what is the reason for the violent death of our fellow Americans halfway across the world, along with the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians? Moreover, why does Mr. Bush seem not to care, refusing to supply concerned citizens such as Cindy Sheehan with answers to their burning questions? Rather, he chooses to go on vacation (he has gone on more vacations than any other American president), and hide himself in his Crawford, TX ranch while the protestors swarm furiously outside the premises like angry wasps.

More recently, Bush took an obscenely long amount of time to react to the horrors and destruction of Hurricane Katrina, taking ineffective evacuation and rescue measures that were, in many cases, too little too late. As a result, countless Americans were left stranded along the Gulf Coast in waist-high waters with no food, shelter, or belongings. Thousands of evacuees are crammed into buildings such as convention centers and sports arenas rather than provided with temporary housing. The death toll is upward of one thousand and is still rising as more bodies are found and more people die from related diseases, and the populace can no longer ignore Bush’s reluctance to act in times of crisis.

People all over the globe suffer the consequences of America’s actions, whether they be an unnecessary war or disrespect of other nations. At home, countless numbers of other Americans are losing their jobs to people overseas who will work for less, losing their inalienable rights and freedoms to a government that could care less, and losing their health as environmental regulations on power plants are rolled back and the poisonous smog continues to belch out uncontrollably. We ask ourselves, why, yet the answer lies hidden inside us, something that we don’t want to admit even to ourselves: the problems in our president, government, and society exist because we’d rather pretend they don’t exist than stand up and fight them. And so I ask you, are you brave enough to stand up for your rights?