The U.S. belongs to us, remember?By Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate:

As Paul Krugman pointed out in a Sunday New York Times Magazine article, getting ourselves into a such a dire financial mess that we have to kill off or at least dramatically reduce Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not just a slight miscalculation on the part of our leaders. They want to undo both the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt.
But I think there is something even worse being taken, being stolen, by this administration. As Jim Hightower observes in his excellent new book, Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back, what they're really stealing is the very idea of this country, the idea that there's a common good, that we're all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better.
In this country, we have the most extraordinary luck -- we are the heirs to the greatest political legacy any people have ever received. Our government is not them -- our government is us (with room for improvement, to be sure).
All this right-wing propaganda about how the government is The Enemy, the government needs to be strangled, needs to be starved, needs to be hocked off, as though schools and hospitals were horrible things -- it's all nuts.
It's our government. We can still make it do what we want it to when we take the time and put in the energy it takes to work with other people, organize, campaign and vote. We can still make the whole clumsy, money-driven system work for us. And it's high time we did so.