It's not just the war in Iraq.

It's not just Katrina and Rita and their hurricane cousins.

It's not just selling government access and laws to the highest bidder.

It's not just tax cuts for the rich.

It's not just more vacation time than any other president in history.

It's not just the deficit.

It's not just the economy.

It's not just high gas prices.

It's not just the sham of the continuing "wars" on terrorism, drugs and immorality.

It's not just creationism or "intelligent design."

It's all of these things. It's all of these things and more.

I didn't think I'd come up with such a long list, because, to me, just a couple of these is enough to knock me over the edge into a simmering pile of bile.

Give me a little coffee, and I'll start having arguments with 4-star generals talking about how to nation build. PR blowhards who are trying to explain how they will prevail at something we have never done successfully outside of our own borders.

The only nations that successfully built a nation were the nations themselves. People try to compare Iraq to our own revolutionary war. Here's something they don't seem to get: we were the revolutionaries. The people of Iraq did not rise up and throw Saddam out on their own. They didn't really even ask us to do it. But now that this has been done, shouldn't the people of Iraq want to finish the job? Shouldn't they have the ability to do it on their own?

And there I am, easily pissed off about just one of the items on my list.

But the country at large, there's gotta be a lot of shit going down before it starts to tip.

I kind of see this as the awakening of a slumbering public. A time when we all wake from this feverish nightmare of fear that has been foisted on us since the terrorist attacks over four years ago. In that nightmare, the goblins and ghouls kept telling us they were scaring us for our own good. That everything they were doing was to keep us safe--but still inside the nightmare. And people are waking up and seeing what being left behind is really about.

If tax cuts for the rich are really the answer. If the trickle-down economy really works, then shouldn't some of us be getting a trickle? It's been over four years since we got our checks from the government (didn't even pay a whole month of rent...thanks!), and that's all we've seen. We got paid off cheap. $300 for the common man, millions for people who are already rich. Is that trickle actually piss running off the boot of the government?

What did we get? More poverty. Costlier health care and prescription drugs. Costlier gas. A sluggish economy. Higher housing prices. And a government that sits with its collective thumb up its ass when something really bad happens.

So us chickens, we're getting restless. Some of us have been squawking for a while, but more of the others have started to join the chorus.

Wake up chickens, they need to hear your irritating squawk. They need to know the clock is ticking. And they need to know you aren't going to go back to sleep until something positive happens. Some kind of change. Because next time, when we wake from the nightmare, hopefully it won't just be into another kind of darkness.

Matt Worley takes the skin off chicken.