Try To Catch A Falling Star
I was never political, though I have voted in every election since I was 21. I lived my life with the assurance that my country was good, that my freedom was solid, that America was unassailable, until the Reagan administration, the rise of corporatism, the greed is good era, rampant, tolerated homelessness. In the 90s, I saw American workers sidelined and unions and thriving manufacturing centers decimated, undermining people’s faith in their country and their politicians. 2001: I watched in horror as the Patriot Act was passed, the first legislation to diminish our Constitutional rights. I drew a through-line from the 1973 legislation that encouraged the commercialization of healthcare. Thirty years of a slow undermining of our quality of life.
Endless wars: I realized that our children were expendable in wars driven by greed masquerading as ideals, that money was our highest value, evidenced by the wars that just kept coming and ended with a slow withering of ideals. We’ve been at war somewhere in the world my entire life, always under the guise of a higher motive than money. Old Cold War ideas died hard.
2010: I read about Citizens United and didn’t really give it much thought, as I’d already lost faith in our ability to do anything about it after Occupy Democrats gave up the ghost. And, I was too busy to do anything about it. 2013: Facebook was a political awakening for me. 2016: I thought everyone would see that Trump was a bad joke. The day after Trump won in ’24, I got a text from Trump, saying they had no record of me having voted for him. Why not? I knew that the jig was up.
When I was a young child, I heard the grown-ups talking about politics at the dinner table. One of them, a friend of my grandparents said, “I’m glad I’ll be dead soon, because the world has gotten too crazy for me.” I was stunned that anyone could ever think or feel that way. But today, I know exactly how they felt.
Brokenhearted, 79