The page is funereal white. I feel the need to fill it up with squiggles that could be buds or birdies, but first some bile.
Did something just die in America or was it a chronic
illness only now revealed? I believe Tuesday’s election was a full-body scan
showing a long-festering malignancy exacerbated by a megaphone of nostrums causing
massive disorientation.
What seemed like a sudden demise is really a pre-existing condition.
Perhaps, even a congenital disorder as a consequence of familial misdeeds never
addressed. We have yet to wash the blood off our hands from a rapacious past blighted
with human bondage.
The underlying cause is systemic with severe maldistribution
of needed nutrients. The body politic had grown increasingly sclerotic with an irregular
pulse. Organic deficiencies in the bloodstream have long been ignored. Tendencies
toward misplaced loathing are not unexpected.
Our free enterprise system yields winners and losers. It has
always been thus. Every benefit won by the working class or middle class has
been hard fought and earned. Even with new prosperity for many, a large body of
aggrieved workers have been left behind.
The usual inequities have been compounded by a bipartisan push to seek cheap labor overseas which has always been the goal of corporations. Jobs vanished with shuttered factories as manufacturing moved offshore. Trump did nothing to confront the problem during his four years in office. Biden has, at least, brought computer chips back to the U.S.
What we have witnessed, tragically, is a population overthrowing the very forces which offer their best hope. Rage has left them deaf to the menace of his words and blind to his misdirection.
A new social contract is desperately needed which ensures the
health, education and welfare of everyone. Instead, the MAGA program would scrap
or weaken the very institutions providing access to the wealth of this affluent
nation.
While on life support, we can still live our lives of
compassion, creativity and love with even a deeper appreciation for the fragility
of those values just rejected. We shall write the psalm needed to see us
through this wasteland. Or better yet, live it, forged out of a new dawn with an incandescence to see us through this dark passage within
sight of beginning sprouts and the feel of wings.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, and yes. My friend, I am in mourning with you. And you've put an eloquent point on what has happened: that Tuesday revealed the long-festering malignancy in our nation. Or perhaps it's an autoimmune disease, where the body has turned on itself, attacking itself in an effort to quell some irritant.
We are in need of those psalms you speak of, and I am grateful for you, the poet, to help write them to see us through.
Thank you. And courage.
Many thanks, David, for your encouraging words.
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