America the beautiful, America the brave, America the free.

Each of these sentiments paint a charismatic picture of this turgid nation. It’s a picture that has enchanted immigrants since the day of her inception.

Majestic national parks that house wildlife reserves testify to her beauty. Its military has established itself as one the largest and most efficient in the world.

Simple freedoms like speech, press and religion cause her to stand out brilliantly over other countries who view the mere concept of rights as laughable.

Believe what you will and what you choose, but the signs are becoming painfully clearer with each passing day: Our “majestic purple mountains” are losing their status and our “amber waves of grain” are shriveling up in the shadow of industrialization.

This country has fallen into a sad state of affairs and is gracefully slipping down the slope of madness and indecision into a black-hole future of total government control. The only way to catch the pieces of this deteriorating nation is a nationwide revolution.

Our Declaration of Independence states that if the people see the ruling government to be unfit in their practices they have the right to abolish said government. Due to its social, political and moral deficits it is critical that this country experience a complete political make-over in the coming years of fresh mistakes.

Personally, I think government should just take a break for a while so we can pull ourselves back together from these past years of ignorance and misguidance.

A somber situation is spreading across this nation faster than an infectious disease.

The elderly have to choose between the medical bills and their weekly grocery allowances. Children wake up, dazed and confused, in a new shelter each morning faced with the shame of having to uproot and take up shelter in a new group home.

And in a country with the highest literacy rate, more than half of the population would rather waste away in front of a television than dive into an adventurous new book.

This image is becoming the new American gothic. We can put a man on the moon and we can clone a sheep, but the notion of providing affordable health care to all citizens becomes an enigma that nobody can solve. Congress freezes up and simply passes the issue off to private corporations who can manipulate the cost to whatever makes them the most profit.

Many families cannot even make half of what is required to meet the standards of living, so how can we expect these families to acquiesce to the outrageous demands of the pharmaceutical companies and medical professions?

This, unfortunately, throws many struggling families into difficult financial situations. Even when these struggling families remove medical costs from their budgets, the money it saves them is barely enough to raise children in materialistic American society where it more acceptable to pick up an Xbox controller than crack open a good book.

Social disarray and inadequacies have added up to the unfortunate consequences of childhood poverty, health care deterioration and literary indifference. These are consequences that should be minimal, if not obsolete, in a country that preaches such prosperity and opulence.

This country has not only failed its citizens socially and politically but it has failed the citizens on one of the most basic levels of human interaction: morality. The issues that this country has chosen to concern itself with are not nearly as pressing as the issues with which they should be concerned.

We are more preoccupied with the fact that a gay couple who are more in love than a straight couple want to obtain a marriage and the rights that come with this institution.

We should be concerning ourselves with the homeless children overrunning this nation, AIDS in Africa, this war that we just can’t seem to get out of and the unfailing ability of Americans to glorify teen mothers, violent athletes and corrupt business practices.

America the beautiful and America the free, can we as citizens truly attain any pride from these declarations any more? After careful consideration, and if you review the testimonies of scholars, the answer should be no.

We may be a beautiful nation but its beauty is obscured by the hordes of homeless. The ever-coveted American freedoms, restricted because we are in “a time of war,” added to the discrimination against certain groups of citizens because of their choice of lifestyle.

I have seen enough violations of the Declaration of Independence on which this country was founded; a country that was supposed free citizens from prejudice, fear and hatred – the top three American products.

Someday this country will realize that the idea of a revolution is not as crazy as it sounds. In fact they will realize that a revolution is just what this country needs.