This
blog entry is personal. I have a question. Are you satisfied? I'm
not. Listening to the news is painful, depressing, and scary. I
understand why so many people have tuned out. It would be easier in
the short term to stick our collective heads in the sand and just
live everyday as if we're not all riding a run away train, the bridge
is out, and the engineer jumped off three miles back.
I've
been as guilty as anyone, just trying to get by, not taking time to
pay attention to the little change here little change there in the
society I live in. Here is how I've come to believe that we stand at
a crossroads.
I
was born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s. There was red white and
blue everywhere. I was taught in school that I was lucky. I was lucky
to have been born in the greatest country on earth. I believed that.
We had obstacles to overcome. Acid rain, rivers so polluted that they
caught on fire. Any one else remember the commercial with the Indian,
(yes we said Indian in the seventies, didn't know better) a tear
running down his face. So sad that there was trash everywhere. I
thought my handing out pamphlets and picking up trash with other good
little tree huggers was helping the planet.
Jump
ahead to the time I had kids. I remember the day, the moment it hit
me like a punch to the gut that decisions made in Washington could
hurt the ones I held most dear. April 15, 1986. I was sitting in a
laundry with my almost 5 month old son and 8 year old stepson. The TV
was on and the regular broadcast was interrupted, Reagan, meaning we,
had bombed Libya. The commentator wondered if we were going to all
out war and if the draft would be reinstated. I looked at my boys and
felt a cold chill. What about their future? Would they have to fight
and maybe die someday?
That
really knocked me out of my little bubble where I only paid attention
to things that interested me, environmental news mostly. The more I
have learned over the years, the more I read about history, not the
cliff notes version we learned in school, but real history, the
more I think that maybe we should pay attention to the mistakes that
have been made in the past and STOP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES!
Jump
to today. Sitting here in front of my computer thinking about my
little granddaughter. thinking about my adult children and the world
that they are inheriting. How much smaller and more dangerous it
seems. I worry daily about another nut job right wing terrorist, not
so much for me, but for my granddaughter going to school, for my
adult children going to work, for other people I care about who work
in schools, or anywhere. It's a national shame that teachers
and school staff have to take classes on how to maybe survive an
active shooter. I do worry about foreign terrorist, but to a much
lesser degree. That's a subject for another day. I'll say this and
leave it alone. We can't give in to fear and hate. Let's not give the
terrorist what they want.
We
can try and get back on track and become a world power to be proud
of, to be the country that other countries want to emulate, or we can
continue the decent into an oligarchy pretending to be
a theocracy, pretending to be a democratic republic. I believe
that aside from good people stepping up and standing up to those
trying to use fear and hate to distract from all the other problems
we face, we need a leader that will go to the front of that runaway
train and pull the break before we go off that broken bridge. Then we
need to get behind that leader to rebuild all of the bridges, roads,
and tracks that we've neglected for too many years. I think that
leader is Bernie Sanders. I think that for so many reasons. I will
address that in my next blog post. For now be careful but not
intimidated, Let's work on making this the home of the brave again,
not the land of the scared and the short sighted. Let's work on
getting back to the land of the free, not the land of giving up
freedom for false security.
