Aus Der Traum?

I was out walking last Wednesday evening, enjoying the additional after-dinner daylight I think of as Summer’s true gift (now that I’m retired, I don’t get up early enough to appreciate the extra light at the start of the day), with much of the heat of the day having already passed.

I gave some thought to walking from my house to Howard T. Brown Park and enjoying the music at Rock the Docks but having hiked that route earlier in the heat and humidity to welcome the return of the Farmers Market, my legs persuaded my brain that a few circuits around Chelsea Parade was a much better idea.  

As I walked towards Monument Park (what I call ‘the first turn,’ because I break almost every project into smaller pieces), on the other side of Washington Street, my eyes caught an A-V project of sorts with two large (one considerably more so than the other) video screens expressing various degrees of unhappiness towards the current president of the United States.

It wasn’t clear to me how much of that displeasure was ideological and/or philosophical and I really didn’t have much to work with since “Buck Fiden,” and “Let’s Go Brandon,” were, I concluded, as close to cryptic and clever as the messages were going to get (without being either)  

I thought about those whose sacrifice we commemorate with the various monuments at Chelsea Parade to the wars in which they fought and died, and how they’d react to the messages across the street, as well as to the athletes who take a knee during the National Anthem (I’m thinking they’d support BOTH) and it dawned on me we have injected such coarseness into our civil discourse in recent years (if not decades) we can no longer disagree without being disagreeable.

As Edward R. Murrow (in this era of Tik Tok you can be forgiven for not knowing his name, so I added a link), noted, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

 "We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation, we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age.

"We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

Earlier this month, we celebrated our nation’s birthday but now more of us say they’d be better off if their state seceded from the United States.

I fear this is a consequence of speaking AT rather than TO one another and listening, not to reason and relate, but to rebut and reject and I wonder if I’m living through the last days of the American Dream.   
-bill kenny