To all my excellent teachers, throughout my elementary years of education who taught me how to love my country, be a good American, God Bless the Flag, and do my best to become a good citizen…thank you! However, and this IS not a complaint, none of you really helped me understand that during the 1950s into the very early ’60s, history was never really a panoramic view of the past, but a more precise decision of facts based on white, Christian heterosexual, well intended, (I suppose) at the time, scholars; whose views of women, people of color, the Indigenous Peoples of North America, and non Ozzie and Harriet, or Ward and June Cleaver family dynamics were considered a sad sickness called dysfunction. In spite of all the negatives and the almost impossibilities to become the Yankee Doodle Dandy, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Honest Abe make-believe American Idol, you, my teachers did provide me with the motivation to declare an allegiance to a nation I, now, looking back seemingly filled with great naivete, believed in and became motivated to help endure and thrive.
Six decades later, here I am, still trying to believe in a nation, and a concept that somehow disappeared, never really existed, or was so instilled in my psyche via the media, the pop culture of the time, and a second generation family, still being directed by its first generation relatives, and I am so saddened that what I believed did not and does not exist and was and is only a façade! To imagine a political party more consumed with conspiring and consorting with a stated enemy of the state…to watch as the Commander-In-Chief become more and more like an Imperial President…to look back at any gains that minorities had received, from fair-minded men and women elected into office, just to be ripped apart and torn up as if they never held any value…to suddenly watch as Communism, Confederacy, Slavery, Nationalism have gained in popularity, and the unbelievable idea that the United States could be a Christian Theocratic country, and above all else the leadership of this nation easily conned into compromise, via blackmail, money laundering, and bribery…has soured my stomach, and has almost diminished if not destroyed all I grew up in believing…that there was real value to Democracy, and that in spite of some self- serving sycophants and snake oil salesmen, Democracy was strong enough survive.
Each day, we are lied to, each day, we are laughed at, each day more crime and graft is committed. Each day, less freedom is granted, and more restrictions are implemented. Each day we are told the OTHER is bad. I still try to believe, the stories, the lessons from my elementary school teachers, their promises that good had triumphed over bad, that right had knocked out wrong. But it has become more of an “old wives tale,” and I am saddened by that!
