The last American lament

A song of failure sung by the children of the planet

Photo by Thomas Young on Unsplash

by Mike Meyer

We’ve spent so long being anguished, anxious, and angry that we have, despite our best efforts, become inured to the destruction of our nation. The past two years have gone by with less and less feeling although the reality is more and more dire.

You try to think about other things. Maybe the people in Washington who keep acting as if this is just a bad political instance are right. Maybe we can just ignore it and hope it doesn’t directly affect us or our loved ones. But the ignorance and hatred are like mold on wet walls. The smell pervades . . .

Ignoring it is hard to do as the body count increases here and elsewhere. It once didn’t matter as much if the dead were somewhere else and part of some other insanity than ours. But we should have known after calling ourselves exceptional that we can’t just slip quietly into third rate nationhood. The other nations are still focused on us because of what we said we were. They are slow to believe it was just . . . advertising.

What happens here is either a model or a bad example but it is what people think about and then act on. We can try to pretend that allowing a group to take control who had no interest but power at any cost, was just a slight error that would be corrected.

That using a mentally ill psychopath to front their final, desperate power grab was just one of those sloppy little things that doesn’t really damage a democracy. But we know that last part has been gone for years. Now our negligence is threatening the planet. And the people of the planet are worried. They need to look elsewhere and will.

But even if we could manage not to look that monster in the face people everywhere who are thrilled by hatred and death as a way to ultimate power are using us as a shield. Our mockery of a president becomes an excuse for murdering helpless people to show that power and fear are what rule. And they are waving us as a flag of racism and armed violence with complete disdain for life and knowledge. There is no such thing as knowledge.

To them the only truth is their emptiness that they want to fill with hate for others and then kill to show what they think…