3:45 in the morning

NOTE to SELF: Large latte at 2 pm is BAD idea.
Since 1 am last Tuesday, our lives have been on other folks time tables. Since last Wednesday we have been in sleeping in a strange bed  [Hampton Inn's].
Dick's mother died Tuesday morning, and the funeral was Friday.
Until last night's 11 o'clock news, I had successfully blocked out the chaos of US politics. But we are listening to the book, Citizens of London, which is about the Americans in London prior to the United States declaring war in Dec. 1941. The US did not enter the war until after Pearl Harbor because Republican isolationists from the Midwest controlled Congress and public opinion. The US and Roosevelt were happy to let one tiny island attempt to fend off the advancing savage by itself. British citizens endured nightly bombings and severe rationing of food and clothing, while Congress insisted that Britain was exaggerating its plight and need.
Congress could not understand that the United States of America, the land of milk and honey, was a world citizen, not a world unto itself.
Sixty years later, the US Congress again does not understand that the United States of America is not just a world citizen, but for now, we are expected to be leaders in that world. The American debt ceiling is our private affair; it is about US taxes and spending. It has nothing to do with world finances.
George W. Bush took a healthy economy, lowered taxes for his wealthy buddies and corporations, started two wars, and left the country with enormous moral and financial debts. He used the excuse of a single attack on the United States that killed a few thousand people to engage in a war essentially based on his own need to avenge his father who had been threatened by one country's leader. He left the American people with a deficit in the trillion dollar figures. I had never heard the word trillion used before another Republican, Ronald Reagan, left the US with a 10-digit debt.
We are a selfish, self-absorbed nation that suffers under the illusion that we can have it all  without paying for it. We have a grid-locked Congress that cannot see beyond the next election and definitely cannot see beyond our own borders  [we are building a fence to protect us from our southern neighbors].
The world is filled with despots and tribal leaders who maintain their power by slaughtering thousands of people; large parts of the world have been living with drought for decades and trying to exist with very little food and water. But only one despot was worthy of an all-out American war, he happened to control a lot of oil.
We are going to be away this September 11, and I am so glad because the US will go on and on and on about how we were wronged one day 10 years ago.
I enjoy the niceties of the United States, I am happily married to a man who is very well off and has provided that his children and I will be taken care of financially. Our house is paid for, and we have the luxury of not having to work. But I fully understand that we are the privileged class. And  although I am not ready to sell all that I have and give it to the poor, I do want to share generously.
It is now 4:30, and I am still not sleepy, and I will pay later today for my stupidity of yesterday, but I am so glad I have gotten some of my frustration and anger out. It has been seething inside, and I cannot speak freely of it.
Listening to Citizens of London has once again made me aware of how selfish and self-centered we Americans are.