250 years...Really?

I don't think so. 🙁

Seen @ a recent rally

In my mind, America can only be 250 years old this year if you’re still running the clock beyond 2016. I’m not. I retroactively hit ‘STOP’ on November 6th, 2016…one day after the election. I’ve found no good reason to restart it since. In my mind, we’re still ten years short. The gap between where we ought to be and where we are grows by the day. 🕘

I get it. There’s still an America marked on maps. Most of us still have American driver’s licenses. We still stand (however uneasily) for the national anthem. We honor as best we’re able the traditional American cultural holidays…say, July 4th and Thanksgiving among others. We’ll get our days off work. We’ll grill our hot dogs and burgers on cue🌭🍔.

The corporations and the sports teams and cable-tv and the neighborhood bars will of course be all over it. We’ll perform a painful, desperate (and if I’m being truthful, a mildly hilarious 😉) kabuki around the faux-patriotic form. Horns will sound🎺. War planes ✈ will buzz the crowds. Old Glory will flap maniacally in the breeze, mocking our dreary living reality on every street corner and in every public square 🏴. Red-faced politicians will bray the usual jingoistic speeches to the usual uncomprehending uplifted faces. NASCAR will roar down the straightaway.

“But where’s the substance 🤔? The only thing that matters is the one thing that’s missing😞. The skeleton still shakes and rattles in the wind💀, but the living organs that made it what it was are gone.”

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The Statue of Liberty 🗽 has stood in New York Harbor for the last 140 years. It has been known universally as a tangible symbol of freedom and hope for all people… no matter who and no matter where. It is such a completely defining and enduring symbol of American aspirations that its damage or destruction has been used in more than a few movies to indicate something on the order of the end of civilization (Does anyone recall that classic scene at the end of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes?). For 130 of those years, its meaning was entirely clear. No one disputed it. There are symbolic broken chains at the feet. It’s etched in stone at the site (and in the heart 💔).

• The New Colossus

In our more recent troubled times, that clear meaning has been deliberately obfuscated in the service of traitorous and evil interests. Petty legalisms have been employed to torture both innocent individuals and the true spirit of the statue. There are those who would say that it applies only to Europeans. There are even those who would say that the President has the authority if he/she so desires to destroy the ENTIRE STATUE (?). In other words, dramatic fiction would be stood on its head, and it would become a self-induced reality of present-day horror.

This… is… madness 😵.

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I’m not going to recite the entire catalogue of abuses against common humanity, good sense, and decency of our last ten dreadful years: There are limits not only to my space in here, but to my elderly mortal comprehension and to my fallible imagination.

The transgressions have been of such volume and velocity that I can’t take it all in. I suspect that in that sense I speak for many of us (about 185 million in America alone last time I checked the polling!). We can feel the pain and the fear of it all, even if we can’t elaborate every sinister point.

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I do wonder if it’s still possible for me to think of myself as an American 🤔(?). I realize that I will so remain in every technical, legalistic sense (it’s too late for me to do otherwise 🙁). Unlike those millions of foreign nationals both here and abroad who so deeply want to be here and cannot, I find myself in the opposite position of wanting to be elsewhere (And yes…I know how whiny and elitist that sounds. I’m sorry, but I tell my truth).

I’ll pay my taxes and by-and-large obey the law. I’ll go on about my business. But something both intangible and crucial has been lost over these years. I don’t feel it so much anymore. I’ve never been overtly nationalistic about, say…Olympic sports for instance. I played a lot of sports when I was younger, and I always regarded all of them as narrow one-on-one contests of individuals or teams. I never thought of any of them as indicating any superiority of a school or a state or a race or a country. I respect all honest competitors no matter who they are. When Americans or anyone else earned their victories fairly, I’ve been glad to applaud them. That’s my code and I’ve stood by it.

But I find lately that I cannot watch an American team in any international competition without silently rooting against them. I can’t unsee the fascist regime that is corruptly building them and supporting them for the crudest propaganda value (some of these fake-baritone juvenile jingoistic cheers drive me crazy! 😬). I can’t unsee the unholy vaporous trails that emanate from each and every one of these unfortunate (and by-and-large, unknowing) tools on the fields of play.

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I hope I can find my way back. I’ve lived a lifetime of genuine respect for the honorable American Way as it was taught to me and passed on. I’ve lost family members and a few friends (both quickly and slowly) in sincere defense of that indefinable but very real thing. I hope they didn’t sacrifice (everything in some cases) for nothing more than the squalid place where we stand in this shameful country today. That would be a terrible waste, a betrayal of what we have lived for, and an unforgivable moral stain before the world and our entire posterity.

I would like to live long enough with the help of a merciful God to at least start the clock again on America 🕘. I have little hope of seeing the real 250th anniversary as I calculate it. But it would comfort me to know we’re back on the right path and it’s on the way back to us at last.