O.U.T.R.A.G.E. membership had now exceeded twelve million Americans. While that still represented only about 5% of the entire surviving U.S. population, it was ample evidence of how people were embracing the movement. Just a few months ago, Oppressed United Taxpayers Revolting Against Government Excess had been a rebel organization viewed by most citizens as an evil, destructive order out to conquer control of the country. Now it was becoming perhaps the brightest symbol of political and social reform the U.S.A. had ever known.
America had denigrated into a sewer of political deceit and social impurity. Fueled by sheer avarice and unbridled lust, the national core had been gnawed at until nothing remained except shreds of excessiveness. Reckless consumerism kept most American families from having any significant savings (most wouldn't be able to survive for more than three months if they lost even one of their jobs). Temeritous government spending had put the United States in debt that would take generations to pay off (calculated in trillions of dollars, most politicians couldn't even comprehend the enormity of such debt, so they just chose, instead, to ignore it and let it continue to pile up).
The O.U.T.R.A.G.E. message was beginning to grab hold of the collective consciousness. The world was a fragile place, not able to sustain all the waste, fraud, fighting, and disorder heaped upon it by stupid, greedy, reckless homosapiens. Whether you believed that the Earth was created from an evolutionary "big bang" process, or God, or "nature", or an 'intelligent designer', you also had to accept the fact that man's carnality had altered the orderly way the world was supposed to work.
Over the most recent centuries, man - within the confines of his own hedonistic, hebetudinous habits - had managed to destroy the goodness, richness, beauty and humanity of the Earth. Yes, there had always been wars. Yes, there had always been greed and sloth. Even in the days of Moses, weak people turned to idolatry for comfort or satisfaction. But only in the last two hundred years had man's flagitous disregard for his own species (and all other species on the planet) overpowered man's appreciation for things ethereal.
The simple beauty of a bird or a butterfly was something most of us failed to notice.
So we replaced those heavenly, delicate values with earthy values: power; money; uninhibited language; casual sex; exotic machinery we used to call 'horseless carriages'; fantasy drug use; and all other kinds of extravagances - including war.
Our sea of humanity had become a cesspool of inhumanity as we followed Ronald Reagan's stalwart message: "All for One, ME..."
The fate of the polar bear or a rare frog in the jungles of the Amazon no longer meant anything to us. The well-being of a poor black child starving to death in Darfur was thousands of miles away from our consciousness. A pile of decaying waste lying in a landfill wasn't of our concern until, of course, it reached our own backyard. Toxic fumes from our HumVees and oil refineries went up in smoke, destroying an ozone layer or a polar ice cap that we couldn't see. Eskimo tribes living in the vast void of the Arctic hinterland seemed strange - and dispensable - to those of us who lived in warm, comfortable houses built out of trees that we cut down at alarming rates each year. A mother trying to raise three youngsters on a small stipend from the government was none of our concern - other than to be critical of her 'living off the government'. The teen-ager, who was sentenced to ten years in jail because he couldn't pay his $40 court costs after being convicted of drug possession, was left to his own devices. Videos of African children, lying in squalor and surrounded by flies, were ignored because those people were just "too lazy to work" (few of us ever bothered to look into the real cause, which - in many cases - was a lack of iodine in their diet, something that could easily be repaired for a few hundred bucks). We loved to listen as Elvis belted out "In the Ghetto" from our $3,000 sound system, but refused to believe that a young man might buy a gun and steal a car out of desperation to escape from his hostile environment - and, God forbid, we ever bothered to try and help him do that. We revered Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, or O.J. Simpson because of their wealth, even though they were, in actuality, nothing more than a common whore, a pedophile, and a murderer. "Low prices - everyday" at WalMart meant more to us than the fact that WalMart used slave labor, and browbeat its vendors in bankruptcy, just to give us those low prices (while four of Sam Walton's relatives were always among Forbes' magazine's list of the top ten richest people in the world). We went to 'war' so that huge corporations could enhance their bottom lines, oil companies could reap ten-billion-dollar quarterly profits, and the military-industrial complex could remain a strong, viable part of the American 'security' scam. Politicians showed little shame in the crusty and crooked ways they maintained their power base.
It was all this - and much more - that O.U.T.R.A.G.E. intended to change. The slaughter it had unleashed in America on January 17, 2008 was the scratch on the surface. Now the real work was beginning, but it would take years.