Poison.

Editor,

Corporations and extremely wealthy people control virtually all of the wealth of the United States. These actors have no interest in what Martin Luther King called "social uplift." They are only interested in accumulating more wealth and exercising the political power that comes with vast wealth to ensure that their aims are satisfied.

Propaganda, laws, and social attitudes that the rich promote corrupt the views of average citizens, purge their thoughts and their vocabulary of anything resembling compassion, understanding, and love for their fellow human beings.

The corporate machine has no interest in funding education, paying school teachers, supporting marginalized individuals, helping people who are suffering, engaging alienated people, giving anything to anyone, no matter how desperately anyone is in need.

Foolish consumers. Silly TV viewers. How easy it is to be manipulated into forgetting one's humanity by factions whose agenda is for you to do just that.

The United States is the least compassionate country on this planet. Lip service, yes. Self-congratulatory assertions that it is a "force for good," yes, as Hillary Clinton claims in the face of millions of people the USA has killed in dozens of countries from after the close of WWII to the present day.

The American psyche -- and I am not talking about Americans who are conscious -- needs a complete overhaul. Everything the mass media reinforce about crime and punishment, wealth and war is poison to the human spirit.

Re: "End Mass Incarceration Now" (5/25/2014)