I spent most of my life as a journalist because I felt I needed to write, and write I shall. I am inspired how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is speaking out against injustice, and I feel that all of us likeminded individuals need to speak loudly with her.
And speak I shall ...
For starters, I think the discourse in our country is becoming too uncivil. The partisan divide is only getting wider and more strained. A first step to recovery is dropping our labels. I will no longer allow people to stand behind their political party, religion, culture, race, or anything else as an excuse for their behavior. For instance, I now see that "conservatism" is simply an excuse for doing nothing. And people do nothing because they are inherently lazy.
You look at me as if something is wrong. But I will tell you that those of us in the progressive community are horrified at how people calling themselves Christians can align themselves with someone as amoral as Donald Trump. Is the abortion issue really that important to you? Or do you get revved up when he goes after the brown skins and all the other bogey men that he uses to scare you?
Can you wake up just for a minute? The wildfires, flooding, and super storms were all projected by climate change models developed in the 1990s. It's all coming true, so, yeah, I believe in climate change. My mind is boggled because instead of doing anything about it we slowly sink our country financially by sending disaster aid to one crises after another. Yet, you do nothing, America.
And as for you, the desperate woman who has made the difficult decision to end your pregnancy, guess what? For the first time and last time thousands of good Christians hidden in churches around the country will suddenly love you. They will love you just long enough to force you to have your unwanted child, and then they will love you no more. Once you have the child they will cut off your welfare and the school-assisted lunches, they will take away your Obama phone, and they will go back to their sheltered churches and their dozens of "activities" that make them too busy to help you or that homeless dude at the intersection.
If I want to see what love is, well, maybe it's in the form of idealism. We are an entire country bonded not by blood or ethnicity, but by the ideals of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. We are a country of idealists in an age where idealism is falling apart. We are a nation of oligarchs, who befriend the foolish theocrats only for votes, in return for supporting their crusade to end abortion and deprive gays of cupcakes. And there I see love again, because money-grubbing, power hungry preachers and their allies in the corporate world, who wish to stomp out the middle class in the name of profit, fall deeper and deeper into love.
I watch and study ants. They are the true example of collectivism, which is really the only way we humans can properly live. The whole idea of individualism is a failure, especially since we've chosen to multiply our species until we are packed like sardines. But we still hold on to our Wild West mythology and the idea that you can do whatever you want with your land, your garbage, your self, and whatever, Meanwhile, the Earth as a whole dies by a thousand tiny cuts.
Religion as we know it was made up by goat herders in the Late Bronze Age, and now people are treating these stories as fact and using their mythology to justify their amoral behavior. I do believe in Jesus and believe he was two thousand years ahead of his time, and he gave us the right way to live, which was promptly ignored by the Jews, Romans, and Westerners alike. Yet, when it's convenient, a few verses are cherry picked from a book that's never read and used to bash others over the head.
In college I studied the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and in class we spent days picking it apart. I kind of got the idea that the poem was a snapshot of life in the early 1900s. I kept digging and analyzing, and to my surprise I realized that the meaning was in the title: "The Waste Land." It's a poem written in 1922 that describes America today. But, what a weird way to start a poem:
What did that mean? It means that April is the cruelest month because the life and color of spring flowers throws our depression into a sharp relief and causes painful memories to surface.
So, there I was, my senior year in college, and it was April 1982. I had fallen in love with the girl I wanted to marry. I had given all my heart to her, and now I could feel the whole thing unravel. She was elusive and noncommittal. I could see her drifting away and I couldn't think of anything more I could do, other than to love her more. It took me nine months to fall in love with her and during that first kiss in September 1981 the dogs stopped barking and the crickets stopped chirping, and everything in the Universe disappeared for a moment. I had created a chasm in the Universe, where I wanted to stay and live forever. But things were awash from the start because although she tried, her feelings were not the same as mine. I prayed, being the selfish dick that I was, that she would love me the same.
If there is any lesson to be learned it's that the one time in my life when I was completely, wildly in love was to become the microcosm of my life and for human existence as a whole. We want to stay in our shells, but sometimes our heart tells us to venture out and risk everything to experience love because it brings us happiness, and happiness is like a drug and we want more and more of it in ever stronger doses. So, I dared to give that once-in-a-lifetime complete love, I took the risk, and ended up like a crushed aluminum can on the side of the road.
To America, to the Christians with their nice cars, to the remnants of the middle class, and to those few of us who actually love this world, even more than this life, I say to you that it's okay to love, and to love one last time, even when you think you can't love any more.
