Home of the Brave? Land of the Free?

 

     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.