Half a Hundred Tries Later

Here's some news from the newsroom floor I came across while sweeping up shortly before Closing Time. It's no longer immediate or current or even urgent (actually it was never urgent) but it says a lot about who we are as a nation and how far we've come.

Whether we've lost our direction, I leave for your personal speculation and hope you'll reciprocate but if I still had a soul, these are the times that would try it. As it is, all I have is Pain(e).

I share my life with a lover who grew up in another country and culture shaped far more by the triumph of arms by mine than I believe either of us fully appreciate. I've always wondered and worried if there are as many things we do that she doesn't fully appreciate as there were for me when we lived in her country. Sometimes, I'm very glad if she does have questions that she doesn't ask them because my paucity of answers is reaching epic dimensions.

And it doesn't look like the players preening and pouting on our national stage, in both wings of the theater so to speak, are doing much to still the disquiet. I fear all of this cognitive and political dissonance is part of a larger disease/infection or perhaps more ominously, a Plague, in which we, as adult Americans, no longer speak TO one another but, rather, AT one another.

We have opted to trade slogans rather than discuss solutions and demonize anyone who disagrees with us. Our political processes seem to always include search for the guilty and scapegoating though neither one has ever contributed to helping a single human being.

 Somewhere, somehow, the Land of Round Doorknobs and unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten stopped being about having ideals and choosing the best ideas for the most people (the nearly legendary, 'greater good') and became choosing a prom king and queen while we shopped for personalities. Now we are reduced to a dialogue that more often resembles a diatribe of "love me, love my dog" or "and the horse you rode in on"  and we are surprised. It's so sad about us.

We have the brightest generation of uniformed men and women (and all shades of the rainbow in-between) in the course of our country's existence who are better educated, clothed, and nourished,  all outfitted with the most impressive and variegated arsenal in the history of war-making defending our One Nation under God, void where taxed or prohibited by law, that has ceased to exist for many of those who swore to defend it from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Instead of fixing things and helping people we apportion blame and try to get none of it on us. The same hand that can help instead points at 'those others' on whom we blame our misfortunes. It's a miracle we haven't outlawed the sale of mirrors by now since many days, I get nauseous at the sight of the abomination I have become while staring into it. Breaking it is an option, if I can handle the seven years of bad luck which makes me wonder how many have we destroyed and how many more are left?
-bill kenny