Have we become a Nation of Barney Stinsons?

There’s a funny scene in How I Met Your Mother where we learn that Barney roots for the blonde kid in The Karate Kid. Later on we find out that he often roots for the villains in film.

Barney Stinson, played with brilliant abandon by Neil Patrick Harris, is everything that’s wrong with the world. He’s materialistic, egomaniacal and a womanizer. He works for Goliath National Bank, a giant bank (read: Citi or BoA) that makes the world a worse place every day, and he loves every second of it (unlike his friends, who work there, but have serious moral objections in doing so). He’s the anti Homer Simpson.

It’s natural that he would completely misinterpret the sentiment of most films.

But Barney’s character is so funny, because he’s so true. He represents a reality in today’s society. We worship folks like Trump, the Kardashians and others who are only famous for being too rich. We honestly say, out loud, that rich people are rich because they deserve it, and it’s poor people’s fault that they’re poor.

We have a greater income gap than any time since the Great Depression, but we elect politicians who feel that workers, union or not, have too much, but CEOs and businessmen who, who get rich on the backs of the poor, don’t have enough. We would shut down the government just to avoid forcing the rich to pay slightly higher taxes. We allow Republicans to control the political narrative. “Business is good, workers are bad.”

We worship wealth, but decry poorness.

We root for Ebenezer Scrooge, not Bob Cratchit.

We root for Henry Potter, not George Bailey.

We root for Bill Lumbergh, not Peter Gibbons.

We have lost our minds. We have lost our sense of what is right and what is wrong. We have lost our sense of good versus evil. Up is down, the sky is red and water’s dry.

Luckily, there are some of us who are standing up for what’s right. And maybe, just maybe, all this is the start of something good. Maybe the people will grab some of the power that we deserve, and we’ll look back on 2011 as the start of a world wide change for the better.

But we had to let them push us to the brink first. We had to buy into their garbage. We had to let them chip away at our health, wealth and well being. We had to get to a point where crazy idiots like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh actually get their views repeated as facts.

It never had to have been this way.