Patriotic Ponderings

Red, white, blue me and you...

Hello my lovely friends and readers! Welcome back! As always, I am so happy to have you all here with me. If you can, please consider going paid. It's a great time to do it because I'm running the “dumbest apocalypse EVER” sale, and you can get full year bpnwc subscriptions for the bargain price of just $15! If you can't afford subscriptions, no worries. I will always be free to read. 😻

I sit in the barber shop gazing out the plate glass at the world, lost in thought with my thousand yard stare doing the hard work of making sure no strangers interrupt my private reverie.

I see the silver red and blue spangled streamers glittering and shimmering in the hazy June sunshine. The car wash, all dolled up in that ubiquitous fourth of July regalia. Celebrating independence and freedom this year hits a bit different. Holographic sparkles and prismatic delights, they are beautiful from afar, but even from a distance I can see that these decorations must have been used and reused now for several seasons of patriotic splendor. If you were to look at them up close you would most likely see the proof of their wear and tear, the twisted, raggedy spots in the metallic plastic ribbons where knots have been tied and untied, areas that are worn thin, layers of holographic rainbow film ripped away with the repeated applications of tape and subsequent removals. It's as apt a metaphor as any that I can think of off the top of my head for the condition of this country right now. Beautiful and aspirational from a distance, full of patriotic pretense, but forlorn and shabby when viewed close up. Cheap, tawdry plastic glamours that have been applied to dazzle and distract from the rank odor of decay and corruption.

I don't know what to do with any of this turbulence. This chaos. This absolute unrest within my spirit. Peace is elusive and slippery, skating away from my grasping fingertips at the last second like a small tentative wild beast that refuses to be caught and claimed. I have so many loose ends untied in my life. So many questions that I know will never be answered with any degree of satisfaction. So why can't I accept this? I tell myself over and over that there are so many more important things to worry about right now, in this moment, besides my own personal hurts and familial betrayals. And still, my selfish mind grips tightly onto them, projecting a wicked repeating slideshow of every offense across my conscious train of thought all slapdash and tick-tick-tick, frame after dejected frame. I feel bitterness creeping into my soul, staining the ragged bleeding edges of everything that is me with it's corrupting acrid tang. This is not me, not who I am. Maybe it is who I must become, though. We are whatever we need to be in whatever moment we find ourselves within, I suppose. Maybe this hardening of my heart is what I need to survive the uncertain future. Maybe the universe knows I'm weak and fluttery inside. That I need some tough love. That my nerves seem to sit above my skin, exposed live wires pulsing. That I have always cared too much about what others think of me. Regardless of the utility behind it, I find myself grieving the soft hearted, tender and easily laughing woman I am leaving behind like a sloughed cocoon that has outlived its usefulness.

None of this is easy for any of us. Well, except for the really evil ones, I guess. They are certainly having their day in the sun right now. A fact that causes me indescribable pain to accept. I wonder sometimes, will we come back from this lowness within my lifetime? Watching these evil and unworthy people run roughshod over the law and the coequal branches of government is like being punched in the face repeatedly while still being expected to smile between blows. Watching them knock down every guardrail with a bulldozer fills me with deep fear for my future. Witnessing them busily laboring with such a maniacal, fevered, frenzied pace towards decimating any social safety net or protection, not to mention every single regulation that has been put into place to stymie the wanton destruction of our planet. Everything that has prevented my own utter destruction up to this point. It has been soul rending and deeply traumatic to see the brutal efficiency they wield in their barbarous mission. The potential for death and destruction on a scale heretofore unknown pulses blackly within the cancerous heart of this regime.

I am filled to the brim with this useless, impotent anger that I'm carrying with me like some vile hitchhiking parasite. It creeps up my throat like acid reflux, burning and corrosive. I am furious at the bitter memories of all the years I tried to warn those I loved and those who I thought cared for me, at a baseline at least moderately more than the average stranger on the street. Mirroring so many other times in my life, I was again discounted, rebuked. Again, I became the exasperated recipient of indulgent eye rolls and the target of whispered conversations accented by raised eyebrows at family gatherings. Again, my fears and concerns were mocked and diminished. I was repeatedly told that I needed to calm down. Now that my warnings have begun to prove themselves out, those same people intentionally distance themselves even further from me. I see now that there will be no redemption arc. No tearful apologies, or heartfelt pleas for understanding. I will simply be excised. Removed from the picture like so much superfluous tissue. Carved out aggressively, lest the reminder that they were wrong remain ringing in their hollow ears. My spoken truths have become deeply inconvenient and now, I must be dealt with. There will be no satisfaction, and that is hard for me to countenance. Yet even in this heartache, there is the silver lining. I no longer have to hold their pre written script in my mind. I am free from the pretension, if not the judgement, and I am certainly free to not care about the judgement if only I can get myself there. I'm diligently working on that part.

Aside from my own selfish personal heartaches, I am also reckoning with a very unpleasant realization. It's really up to us, my friends. There are no magical fixes. No rock star politician who will ride into town at the apex of all this horror and singlehandedly turn things around just when it looks the darkest. To be honest with you, at this point in the game, if a magically charismatic Democratic politician were to show up on the scene and start making major waves, you can bet your bottom dollar that I would greet them with a deep well of cynical skepticism that I did not possess until recent years. Years of being idealistic and hopeful with dismal diminishing returns on my emotional investments have led me to this place rather organically. Our government is largely captured. Our courts are captured. Law enforcement, held in sway by evil men and women. The American press has largely been neutered as well. The solutions that might have worked in the past will not serve us well in this new reality. We must recalibrate and focus our energies where they are needed right now.

I know I'm not alone. So many of us are out here, dangling from the edge of the same cliff, waiting to see if anyone will show up with a safety harness or a rescue team. What do we do with all of this? Because from where I'm sitting, it is starting to look like the jig is up, and like we really need to be making some contingency plans real quick. It feels like there are still way too many people sleepwalking towards that ledge as we speak. My lovelies, the truth is plain: there is no magical rescue team showing up. We must reckon with this fact or we will find ourselves deluded and surprised when shit goes sideways and no white knight rides up on his glorious steed.

So what can we do? Well, in this scenario, when all the systems that were put in place to protect us have been co-opted by nefarious assholes, the only way that I can see to put any kind of real hurt on the bastards in charge is by hitting them right in their big fat pocketbooks. We must organize and strike, my friends. Not for a day or even two. We must prepare to sacrifice and hold them to account for extended periods of time. We must strike at the very heart of their lifeblood. Industry and capital cannot move the levers without the blood, sweat and tears of everyday working Americans greasing the gears. We alone have the power to bring them to their knees with the one thing that speaks their language. Money talks, after all. Isn't that what they've been saying for decades now? Well, let's allow our money to talk, let it shout, let it clap like a peal of hot thunder in their ears. Shut down their factories! Close down their offices! Leave the phones in their call centers unanswered, their tables uncleared, their dishes unwashed and their food unserved! Come together with your friends and your families and your community and support each other through this! Community centers can be used to host potluck feeds so that nobody goes hungry. Rolling strikes that are coordinated can cause real economic impacts for these capitalistic swine while at the same time cushioning the impact on the individual. My friends and fellow countrymen, this is going to be a hard sell for many of us Americans. We are spoiled and decadent, highly individualistic, and used to on-demand everything. It will be hard to pull off, but it is quite literally the only leverage that we have. I fully understand the difficulties in doing this, relative to other countries that have done it successfully. I am familiar with all the arguments against trying it. This country is so large and so sprawling and so diverse that it would be an enormous undertaking. Maybe it will ultimately turn out to be impossible. But ten years from now, wouldn't you at least like to know that you tried anything within your own power to right this ship? I know I would.

So, I am once again reaching out to you, my friends and neighbors, and I am asking you to really find your patriotic spark again. Not the faux plastic glitter kind of patriotism either. Real patriotism. The blood and mud and true American grit kind. The stuff that myths and legends are made of. Let us prove to the whole world and to those scurrilous bastards who fancy themselves to be the masters of the universe that America really can be exceptional. It is scary to know it's up to us, but there is a freedom and an agency in that knowledge that I find beautiful nonetheless. It is up to you and me, my friends. Take my hand and I'll take yours, and together we can turn this country back into something worthy of pride once more.

😻 bpnwc

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