We could have had it all.

As usual, our heroine rides in on the coattails of a major social movement, dazed from the crash and burn through the atmosphere on the way back from the moon.

I was killing time between mock calls for certifications the other day by reading salon.com news about OWS (for my local readers, it's a social protest movement, the largest and most significant of its kind since the Vietnam War Protest "Occupy Wall Street") regarding the overweening greed, malfeasance, and bad decision making of Big Business in the US.

The slogan that's come out of this is "We are the 99%", meaning basically, that the stolen and cribbed wealth of the "1%" at the top should be redistributed to the rest of "us." The articles there say really anything I have to say better and more coherently, but as an American living abroad, there's something more than a little melancholy for me seeing this. When I left the country, I felt that I was leaving a beloved relative to die of cancer, and now it's like watching the desperate members of the extended family gather round to cast a spell to reanimate the dead body.

Tragic and frightening, sad, and something to admire in its intensity at the same time. I've never been an activist, it's something that I admire in others, but I have a tendency to think things are going to go the way they're going to go no matter what, and a candle has to burn out all the way, a kind of "We didn't start the fire" mentality. When I think of the scope and depth of the planet, and of history, the protests seem both large and extremely small at the same time. I'm proud of my countrymen who are taking a stand, and I also have to smile: Welcome to the way virtually everyone else in the world lives.

I too feel ripped off. I too mortgaged my life with crushing school debt with the promise of a "good" job after I did what I was supposed to do and got good grades, played the game, and rolled the dice. Well, shit, they came up snake eyes, and I found myself working in collections, alongside ex cons, women who had been laid off after 20 years in the same industry and who had to start over at 9 dollars an hour, and desperate people who had nowhere else to go.

Aside from my beloved friends and family, there is nothing in the decayed, corrupt, played out US for me. I was robbed, along with hundreds of thousands of Americans who bought into the American dream, which slipped through our fingers somehow, while we were bent over our books studying the past, hoping for the sunlight to touch our shoulders, our faces, our necks, to gild us the way it had everyone else, and would forever, and ever, and ever, amen.

From afar, gazing backwards, now I see it all, playing out on the world's stage, a sad and dingy affair, the gathering of the tribal bands that will dominate the wasteland that once was the mightiest land on the planet.

Some of us will go to colonies, some of us will stay and accept the "fait accompli", some will sink into despair at the sight, some will gather around the standard and fight, never knowing if their efforts will come to anything, or will just be another toy war with wooden soldiers.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'