Oh, America!

Oh, America, you wide open wound, weeping with rage and unrest. You have stunned all us liberals who fancy ourselves educated and evolved. You are done with our smug vision of a perfect world where everything works and all are welcome (except those who don’t follow our rules). You’ve had enough with our political correctness and our hybrid cars and Pilates. You are done with the Wall Street we (and you) allowed to go on trading, without accountability, without shame. You put the match to the torch and said, “fuck alla yuz.”

I get you. I do. I also wonder if you know what you’ve said yes to – all those cartoon promises and claims that every fact checker debunked within the hour (and didn’t matter to you anyway). Those facts will come back to bite you – and me and all of us. Facts will matter when we try to fix system we’ve mismanaged and mortgaged away.

Our man rode in full of hope and change, only to be blocked at every turn – even  when he proposed your ideas –  because he was from the other side of the aisle. You’ll get that back, in spades. Retaliatory infantilism isn’t exclusive to you. We’ve got plenty of vengeful whiners over here. And all of us will fracture bit by bit, street by street, class by class and race by race, until we are all buying semi automatics to protect the last bit of cash, or to wreak vengeance on an enemy, or simply to fire off into the sky because no one is listening anymore.

Or not. Maybe this won’t be Rome before the sacking. Maybe we’ll go on, business as usual, a nation of shopkeepers turned nation of victims. And we’ll find someone else to blame.

Or maybe we’ll hit bottom like a hard-core alcoholic, go to a meeting and start taking responsibility for our actions. Because your man can’t magically fix it as you’d hoped, any more than he can magically destroy it as we fear. He’s just a guy. Unless we turn him into a god. And we know how that turns out.

I love you all, every bit of your beautiful and terrible self. Goodnight.

3 Comments

  1. The electoral pendulum, thank God, has swung back and forth constantly for over 200 years. Jefferson and Adams had a vicious campaign and only mellowed toward each other in their old age. Hamilton was shot in a duel. Andrew Jackson dueled successfully. Abraham Lincoln was eviserated in the press and assasinated in late middle age. God has blessed America through it all. Another liberal, FDR by his lengthy tenure, reminded us that President Washington was right in limiting his time in office such that 2 terms became the limit. May the pendulum continue to swung and May God bless America.

    • Thanks for your insight and reminder of what’s happened before. Very true about the pendulum swing. I’m not quite as sanguine about our future, except that I hope whatever hardship we face in the near or distant future will curb our excesses and force us to grow up. America is still a young nation, and we have much maturing to do.

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