I Am Still Here

One down and one to go; I’m talking about national political party nominating conventions which were days-long coverage on every TV channel when I was a kid and everybody’s parents used to schedule mealtimes around them. Now they are covered the way seagulls fly over and….keow.

Perhaps it’s the near-hellishly warm weather many parts of the country have had in this, yet another summer of our malcontent. Maybe that’s why we’re just a little brusquer with one another and have less patience than at other times because when you get down to it, these are NOT other times.

Social historians writing for contemporary magazines, ranging from Rolling Stone to The Atlantic and The New Yorker have chronicled the outrage that practically every segment, ('demographic' is the buzzword used in poli-sci circles), we are feeling. We are Cranky with a capital “C,” if I may offer my own descriptive.

I know people who 'only' get their news of the world from a single platform of Main Stream Media, be it the New York Times, Fox News and/or every flavor in the rainbow from one to the other (and if you think those two are polar opposites, then good luck telling me where to put World Net Daily because at first blush, I understand next to none of it.

I like chocolate ice cream (I'm probably not supposed to eat it, but I like it anyway) but I eat other flavors, too. It's about more than freedom of choice of ice cream flavor; it's about NOT missing out and not getting an opportunity to sample every perspective. That's why I read/watch/listen to people with whom I disagree, to stretch my mind while listening to their arguments. But lately, we've been eating ice cream and getting brain-freezes.

Every one of us is in danger of reducing ourselves to rude bumper stickers, be we "MAGAs" or “WOKE.” The only thing more pointless than putting other people in boxes with simplistic labels is allowing someone to do it to you. If all you think of when I say Whitman, is a box of chocolates, Forrest, you need to get another life, because I mean Walt.

“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” That’s from his Song of Myself and is an examination of the American Spirit because despite the title it is about everyone other than the author. It is about you and me, the Americans unborn at the time Whitman wrote it. And perhaps he penned it because he knew someday we'd need it.

We have many words to tell us how we came to this point in the story of ourselves but too few to tell us how to go forward and move ahead. The pages are blank but so, too, are many of the minds who would lead us, leaving us to our own devices. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

If we've learned nothing else from our history, it's that no matter how we fight (and we were engaged in ferocious national fratricide a little more than a century and a half ago, despite still seeing the flags of losers in too many places), we are still standing and this, whatever, this moment of self-loathing and self-doubt will someday be called, this, too, shall pass.
-bill kenny