I'd been doing my taxes and listening to the news, a deadly combination. I had to get outside chop-chop. Out! Was it worth going postal? Not yet. Not this afternoon, anyway.
Outside with Joe, my sixty pound, pure black, goofy golden doodle. Three years old with the energy of a Gatling gun. Unlike a trained bird dog, Joe ranges way out there and back again with the exuberance of a creature unbound and free. I don't want to rein him in because I don't want to be reined in, either. We are together in the meadows bordering West Kill Creek as he lopes, leaps, bounds, and courses at jaw-dropping angles that seem like illusions even as I witness them. Pure joy. Bottle it. Breathe it, and I meander along without destination, far away from everything. I look up at the sky and think, "You can't get me here,", full well knowing it can.
Recently, my wife said, "We thought we were coming apart, but the world beat us to it." Everything seems a little more precious now which makes me even angrier than usual because I could lose it, that the world out there is not the world I've lived in forever, until now. I have always felt safe breathing the air of this country, always happy and relieved to be home from wherever I was. Not anymore. There's a disquieting undertone now, not from the street itself but from the knowledge that wheels are turning, gears are grinding, groups are plotting, engines are idling. What next? I'm not quaking, but wondering, literally, what the hell is going on, because something sure as hell is! It feels as if way out to sea, out of sight of land, deep currents are gradually gathering into a monster wave which will someday morph into a tsunami and launch such destructive power that, when it recedes, will have created a whole new landscape. Similar but foreign. We will not think of our lives in the same way. We will not think of our country in the same way. How many generations will it take for our new identity to cohere and settle? I'm not convinced I'd be happy with what that will be. What will our history be? What will our legends be? Who will our heroes be? Stay tuned. I would if I could.
It's dangerous out there. Truth has become so elastic we cannot know what is and what isn't. Truth might have once been relative, but now there is no truth at all. From a 6,000 year old earth to a stable genius in the WH, there is no more truth. Talk about a trickle down effect. Dumb and Dumber and Dumbest. I see fools reveling in ignorance, and a deadly incompetent with absolutely no moral compass in the lead, on the loose. I'm told that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates are in collusion to exploit the pandemic. I'm told George Soros and the Rockefellers are plotting to dominate the world's economy. I'm told the Clintons are operating a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. I'm told, in a Texas schoolbook, slavery is discussed as "workers brought from Africa".Are we that nuts? I see pickup trucks with armed men flying the flag of traitors blocking the entrance to an emergency ward keeping first responders from their jobs. That isn't even human. Warriors For Freedom? There are no words ugly enough to describe them. "Deplorable" will do. Here's a suggestion: mainline some chlorox. Cram an ultra-violet light bulb up your ass. Then tell me this plague is a hoax.
Most disturbing of all is this insistent feeling that the United States may well be an empire in decline. Some might rejoice at this, but I am not one of them. My mother once told me, "You've got a mouth. Use it.", and I have. I've been very critical of the United States, but I also served her as a United States Marine. One of the proudest and happiest moments in my life came watching my two year old, Colombian daughter clutch a little American flag in her tiny hand as part of a multi-cultural, multi-racial ceremony swearing in brand new citizens of the United States of America. "This is America," I thought, "This is my country," and surprised myself because I meant it. Yet, I'm not about to whitewash the sins of our founders. Genocide and slavery built this country. I'm not a communist. It's just the truth: when a nation deliberately wipes out another culture, that's genocide, and, when people are kidnapped and brought to a foreign country to labor for free until they die, that's slavery. Still, in my lifetime, which includes both the civil rights era and the Viet-nam years, many of us believed what we were taught - that we're a nation of laws, of equal rights, of liberty and justice for all. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no, but the principles were there. They'd been codified, written down, and we believed in them, and our belief in them led us to stand up and demand that promises made be promises kept. For all of us. A younger generation tells me we were naive because we had faith and hope. For all that, I'm told, nothing has changed. But, I changed, and so did others. I believe a good fight will, if one is on the side of the angels, push us just a little further towards the light. So, fight. It feels a whole lot better.
END
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