I am, as those who have met me can attest, the most caustically cynical person if not on Earth than at the very least in this hemisphere.
If our paths have yet to cross, let me congratulate you on your good fortune but also point out the laws of probability being what they are, your luck is bound to run out at some point. Thank you in advance for being a good sport.
I was out walking yesterday afternoon on a beautiful day here in The Rose of New England (you are familiar with New England, I hope; we are where the history comes from) and as I made my way around Chelsea Parade, just steps from my house, I saw the flag was at half-staff.
I think I felt a shiver of pride (did your cynicism warning light just come on? It should have), that at a time when we cannot and will not agree on basic human rights for every single person; where we've decided poverty is the fault of the poor, themselves, as a punishment for not being wealthy; when we've reparsed the meaning of The New Colossus to apply only to those enumerated in the Constitution (or was it the Magna Carta?); where worries about propping up Wall Street overwhelm efforts to rescue Main Street; when lies on a scale and scope not heard since Goebbels was doing public relations for the TeppichKauer fueled ignorant, ill-informed, and aggrieved mobs of almost all white men to storm our Capitol for the first time since the War of 1812; and prostituted our mass media to create echo chambers that allow us to demonize everyone and anyone with whom we disagree from the comfort of our own living rooms, my fellow Americans, we've found something to both celebrate while blaming all those we already hate!.
It's something we did to, rather than for, ourselves because, let's face it, there are entirely too many of 'those people' (and you know the ones I'm talking about) so we more or less evened out the odds by quarreling and quibbling for so long all while doing as little as possible for as long as possible to address the horror of Coronavirus-19 that it has now killed one million of us. And shows no sign of slowing much less ceasing.
No wonder we're so proud to call ourselves the greatest country on earth.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment