The Goldene Medinah. The Golden Mountain. "Amber waves of grain". "Fruited plains". "The tired, the poor....yearning to be free." This used to be the America we all knew, or thought we knew, the America to which we pledged allegiance. The America in which we could trust our elected leaders to put the country first and themselves and their party second, at least for the most part. A country where partisanship was not the be all and end all of life.
And yes, there was always a place, a person, a group, which did not fit into that America. There were the pockets of poverty, be it the 'hollers' of Appalachia or the tenements of an urban city, or even the family of middle class status whose breadwinner had lost the job. But now it has become a land where food pantries are pressured by the growing and more frequent demands of people, where McMansions are being built with extravagant features while more and more are homeless, including families with children.
As for those "huddled masses yearning to be free", today instead of spending the money on welcoming, training, absorbing, we spend the money on more officials and hired crew to chase them, to deport them, to house them for years in deportee and immigration centers. We chase after the young and the old, it matters not in this new America.
Our officials consort with the enemy and we abuse and insult our allies. We have alt right gatherings of hate and a growing number of vociferous purveyors of prejudice and hatred, feelings that should long ago have died. So today we have a rampant hunger in many places, hidden or out in the open. We have a loss of hope and faith amongst those whom the economy has left behind, untrained and not ready for the new world. We have frustrated and angry university graduates, weighed down by debt, who cannot find jobs commensurate with their training and who work as servers and barristas and temporary help. Our elected and appointed officials seem to think that they are there to serve themselves rather than the electorate and our 'leader' is certainly not that!
So in our wonderful country we have hunger and poverty, hopeless cases. We have fear for our children, fear of the future and hatred grows apace. Old canards come rocketing back and never before has there been such a time of concern for our future, the future of an increasingly abused Mother Earth, and a deep gnawing worry for our future generations.
Yet there is hope. There is a dim light growing and standing out amidst the darkness. We have those who stand up with courage and defend the helpless - and even die for it - but it is there. We have the man who buys a soldier desperate to get home a ticket out of his own pocket. We have the truly elderly honored for their part in defending our liberties and country in WWII and the Korean War. We have the volunteers who staff the food pantries, who walk amidst those who need help and who give that help. We have some of the 1% who realize they must give back and who set up true philanthropies. But it is not enough. The hatred must be fought and the hope must be strengthened.
The world of politics must be cleansed of those who would rip us off, betray our country, defy our allies, anger them even as some among us give comfort to the enemy. We need to demand qualified people serve once more as our representatives and not run our government as a business, a failing one at that, but as a government envisioned by Lincoln and our Founding Fathers - and Mothers for that matter - a government of and by and for the people. We need to become a country where women are respected, equal in rights as all humans should be. We need to become a country where even the administrations of smaller entities realize that force and abuse, that chicanery, lies and selfishness are no longer going to be tolerated.
Can we become this country? Can we chase out the hatred and the fear, the hunger and the poverty? I certainly hope so for if not, if we do not make an attempt, a serious, hard and long attempt to do so, then we indeed have to fear for our country and the world. The choice is up to us. We need to stand up to the false leaders, to voice our demands and insure that we are heard. We need to reach out to the underdogs. We need to destroy the venomous hatred that runs rampant thru our society for it poisons all of us. And we need to take care of our planet, our home and science fiction and fantasy aside - there is no other place and no secret fleet of spaceships ready to haul the 1% and their servants off to safety. Nope, this place is it and our civilization can be the forerunner of a better world or the forerunner of all that is bad and that will kill all of us as the planet dies.
Choose. Remember that we are choosing for more than ourselves.
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