Sunday’s Sixty Minutes offered for us a needed, even hopeful story of good and selfless Americans striving to help their struggling fellow citizens, doing things that an obstructionist, do-nothing Congress will not do. Still fresh in my mind is the action of partisan, loathsome Senators, thwarting the will of over 90% of Americans who favor background checks in order to purchases guns. Forty-six Senators, who pledged to defend Constitutional rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, would ignore the will of the people and allow more harm to befall men, women, and children in our public and private places from deadly weapons in the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.

With little or no societal defense or support against powerful forces that continue to oppress us, Americans grow weary of the fight against the ever present gangster forces ruining our country. All we seem able to do is chronicle in a sensation-bound media the grievous damage poor or non-existent leadership does to millions of Americans and to billions worldwide. The most serious perpetrators are on a short list, most of which will never be made to pay for their offenses against humanity. They include past and present US Presidents, CEOs of the largest corporations, and members of the US Congress.

But you have to narrow down the perpetrators to only the worst, those who have caused the most widespread damage in terms of human lives and suffering. Add to that, those whose actions were planned with forethought, and implemented for pure self-interest, ruthless actions we can only call evil.

Some are quite easy to identify, feloniously leading us into destructive wars like the Iraqi War and the Viet Nam War, the latter decades ago, both killing hundreds of thousands, maiming hundreds of thousands, causing untold misery to scores of loved ones who lost men and women to the war, to suicide because of the war, and to lifelong illnesses, including mental disease, brain injuries, and physical disabilities. We only need to remember history, dispelling the attempts of unprosecuted perpetrators to rewrite history. We need to observe the continuing evidence of suffering of veterans — the homeless, the unemployed, the suicidal, and the forgotten disabled waiting many months to be recognized. We need to see what is done and needs to be done on TV shows like Sixty Minutes.

We must remember the abuses of the past to avoid their repetition, something that has already come to pass. The history we’ve forgotten is the Viet Nam War and its bogus cause. Viet Nam was a war forgotten and so soon repeated in Iraq by its perpetrators, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, coming from their deliberate manipulation of the truth. President Obama is not blameless either. The damage he has done includes drone killings, rendition, spying on American citizens, excessive punishment for whistleblowers, ignoring foreclosed homeowners and pampering Wall Street. He probably can delude himself into thinking it was for the best.

Probably the second worst group would be the Republicans in Congress. Their actions are willful and destructive to the democracy they have pledged to protect, and it’s all for money and power – their own and the people who pay them to do their bidding. For example, there’s Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, peddling fear and seeking appeal from the gun lobby, suggesting Obama’s government agencies are depriving citizens of bullets, and that he wants to take their guns away. Now Democrats have a role in this destruction as well, perhaps less harsh, but many are compromised, ignoring or slowing down needed reform and changes.

Notable is Harry Reid, especially since Harry betrayed the American people by doing next to nothing about filibuster reform, now hamstringing appointments and stopping gun safety reforms. In contrast, Republicans are in full destruction mode. Nothing beneficial to the majority is allowed to happen in either house of Congress, the GOP controlling the House and shackling the Senate with the filibuster.

Though helped by deregulation, I think the third worst group includes Wall Street leaders and traders who caused the Great Recession, reducing family net wealth by 40% by fraudulently absconding with funds from average Americans and putting the whole world into jeopardy with their reckless, self-serving behavior. These perpetrators still maintain, actually glorify, their greed and lack of concern for others.

The tragedies they all have caused have left many victims. Financial suffering and opportunities lost come from the redistribution of funds away from investment opportunities like education, ravaged in many states; small business support, which monolithic banks ignore; rebuilding failing infrastructure, which cheap money could easily buy; investments in science; even nutrition for the hungry. The shift to lower taxes with the Bush administration, and outright giveaways to powerful rich interests continue while Republicans refuse to budge on investment in the people.

The destruction and heartache that all perpetrators have caused is still written on the faces of those who are affected, many returning veterans. They include long-serving military veterans returning to homelessness, unemployment, and foreclosure – all conditions forged by GOP lawmakers who only guard interests of the rich. If that in itself isn’t enough, many veterans are contemplating suicide, losing jobs government promised to preserve for them, or are languishing in hospitals.

They are poverty stricken Americans who even now must fight the entitled rich for funds for meals, funds dried up by stone-hearted members of Congress still choosing low taxes for the rich, in their schemes to redistribute income and wealth from the middle class and the poor to the well-heeled. The victims are the incarcerated whom we allow politicians to imprison in record numbers instead of educating them or helping them find jobs. Summarily, there are those who have lost hope as funds dry up for education, family support, and opportunity.

Hopeful efforts were documented on last Sunday’s Sixty Minutes.

Some of the rich are trying to substitute for the lost safety net expenditures that neo-conservatives with their Social Darwinist beliefs have torn down, actions started in the Reagan administration and accelerated more recently. Sixty Minutes documented some of the suffering wrought by the perpetrators of war and plutocratic puppets in Congress and highlighted help programs. For example, the Robin Hood Foundation has applied business techniques to help the needy and vulnerable rather than the pursuing more profit.

Counter-insurgency war veterans have applied their techniques to gang crime in American communities, helping to organize lawful members of the community to make their neighborhoods finally livable. Dramatic brain injury due to multiple concussions and post traumatic stress accounted for 36% of debilitating injuries in American wars. Private citizens have assembled help from various sources, including a UCLA doctor and other concerned private citizens, starting a private foundation for such veteran care.

Seeing the efforts of such concerned Americans does give hope. All that the American majority has observed of late is elected leaders ignoring the will of constituents while doing nothing to solve crucial problems. A classic example included 42 Republicans and four Democrats in the Senate who voted against background checks for gun ownership, something that over 90% of Americans desire.

Hope and opportunity must replace the injustice, self-interest, greed, and money controlling our bastions of power — from corporate boardrooms, to the Supreme Court, to the halls of Congress, and in state houses making a mockery of democracy like North Carolina and Michigan. We must concentrate on helping people not on putting them in prison. It is no accident that we have the highest prison population percentage in the advanced world. Is this a sign of greatness, or an inability, even unwillingness to solve critical problems?

We need to see the end of suffering in the faces of the unemployed, those underpaid who work two or three jobs, the uninsured sick, and the homeless. For grade schools and high schools we need to see learning and opportunity, not intolerant extensions of jails and prisons.

The hope we see seems to be only where private citizens elbow aside too many misanthropes in public life who have their own agenda of power, an agenda that has absolutely no focus on the needs of others, only their own needs.

Government is where such organized help should come from. It is a great irony – and tragedy – that the anti-government forces, ironically the GOP which controls the House and hamstrings the Senate, not to speak of the wildly radical GOP majorities in states that are violating rights and constitutional law, are the first to demonize big government as autocratic, and even support NRA bullies who suggest armed insurrection is necessary.

Are they suggesting shooting themselves in the face?