Sorry. I don't mean to call you out, or belittle you America. I love you. But living in Cambodia for over a year, and missing many of you, my dear family and friends, and only in touch through the interwebs, and headlines and Facebook posts, i just need to vent. And i know many of you have been reaping the whirlwind during this clown show of an election cycle, while i have remained mostly silent. I didn't think this ultimate troll of (what remains) our democracy would get this far. So i must vent a little... (Written after listening to a few speeches from both conventions)....
Wake up America. Did you forget you are driving a huge 18 wheeler down the highway of the worlds’ life- a drunken madman schlepping own a Monster energy drink at 70 mph after midnight recklessly drifting off to your solipsistic slumber, slobber dripping down your two chins? And what about the precious cargo you are carrying? Do you realize that you were at the helm as the 20th century became the 21st? The world was watching you as a little brother looks up to his big brother even though he is often on the receiving end of his adolescent angst. Yes, you were viciously attacked. You were not the first and certainly won’t be the last. Whether you believe it was your chickens coming home to roost, the beginning of a clash of civilizations, or somewhere in between, truth is not black and white. It’s bathed in three dimensional technicolor, illuminated by patience and time- wisdom’s reflections.
As you emerged from the promise of your birth and dark early years of hypocritic genocide and enslavement and proudly rose through earnest ingenuity to aid in the defeat of the world’s first post nuclear tyrant, were you self-aware enough to realize that a fair portion of the bountiful earth’s resources were not just there for the taking, but available because of the very promise you made- that all people are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Did you mean it? Were you even slightly aware that the actions of many of your greatest citizens in your history inspired the world, and for a moment eagerly listened to you as a beaten wife with daddy issues, who briefly imagined you the righteous father she never had? Or was that just the promise of a megalomanic saying whatever he had to get into Lady Liberty’s silken dress? Was all that just a dream of whimsy, confirmation of your illusory manifest destiny to conquer and rule for the benefit of the few at the cost of so many?
In my youth i was a flag waving patriot, romanticizing an America that never truly existed and pledged my allegiance at the beginning of every school day. My was father born a broke bastard, he worked his ass off and achieved, so i believed. Every summer watching fireworks and celebrating your birthday, did you just get too drunk to appreciate the masses who loved you? That so many sacrifices gladly given unto you, were not just to build monuments to your vanity, and pay you your precious pounds of flesh but to achieve the promise in the poetry of The Constitution? After the inevitable naivete of youth, and the selfish rebel wanderings of the prodigal son i return to you in my middle years, still a patriot, but not as the overlords and corporate media would like (a simpleton easily manipulated), but a wannabe Whitman, Thoreau or even a failed Kerouac singing your praises but wise enough to call you out on your giant volcano of hypocrisy and bullshit. Civil disobedience is a major part of your birth story and your early Fathers sapiently knew it was a right to guarantee lest the torments of tyranny return and reclaim that which was never its to take. Yeah, all lives matter, but are you too dense to see a system of pervasive white privilege, so much so your ego is ignorantly offended by the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose of absolute necessity to raise awareness of systemic inequality?
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness- black, white, man, woman, gay, straight, trans, bi are all entitled to these inalienable rights, if you believe in the Constitution, that separates church and state, which you teach your children about in history class. And yet now, America, half asleep you listen to the talk radio ravings of snake-oil salemen and women, a reality t.v. carnival barker who twists your fears to the whims of his profits as if he were a prophet. He is a prophet. A prophet of tyranny, fear, unimaginable vanity and self-aggrandizement. It’s as if you finally looked into the mirror America, and he and his hair plugged coiffed pompadour with orange make-up and faux gilden name is the reflection you foolishly choose to see. Is he really you?
Regardless how you feel about marriage, abortion, taxes, economics, foreign and domestic policy, are you really so asleep in self-absorption, the oblivion of self-centeredness, that you willingly sleepwalk out onto the global community’s stage to be the idiot jester in this tragic-comedy of errors? Don’t you know anything of Love? Real Love IS the great compromise. You have far more in common than difference and if we are but patient and listen to one another, we can celebrate those differences and learn from them, rather than let it divide and conquer all that we hope and dream for. The precious cargo you carry is the hopes of every parent for their child’s future, the belief that they can achieve what we failed trying to, if given an opportunity- the namesake you claim. The dreams of the next generation are about to careen off the road if you don’t wake up America. Wake up!
