Oh Say Can You See... (Brave New World, Part One.)

Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave ~The Star-Spangled Banner.

At around 4:20 this morning, Joe Biden pulled ahead of Donald Trump in vote counting in Georgia, and the lead kept widening after that.

In that moment, I knew what my college friend Mohammed must have felt when the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt toppled Hosni Mubarak in part because Christian and Muslim Egyptians alike stood up and said no, no more. We're tired of you and your police and your repression, of your blatant corruption and lavish hypocrisy. 

The people stood together, they prayed together, they got the Egyptian Army's enlisted soldiers on their side and enough of those in power and in command of the Army heard the sound of a million people praying, saw the football hooligans duking it out with the police, and the young men fearlessly climbing on top of the tanks and they took Hosni Mubarak and threw him in jail and went to the people and said "We hear you."

I remember reading his Facebook post that day.

I never thought for the life of me, that I would ever write something similar. But here we are:

Americans, be you Immigrant or native-born, whatever your creed, color, race, or religion, and even your citizenship status here, so long as you're here in good faith..

THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY!

Not Donald Trump's, not the Republican Party's, America is not defined by and does not belong to the ultra-wealthy, or to some vast conspiracy cabal either foreign or domestic, but to its people, all of us, no matter who or what we are, and to any who have come here seeking a piece of the dream that is America. 

But some people, they don't want to be included in that, they want to rule over it. Even though they know how it turned out, they'd rather be the Serbs than the Bosnian Muslims. Yes, when somebody calls themselves a "Nationalist" that is what they are saying.

And that is exactly the kind of mentality that we, as disparate colonies of the British Empire, rebelled against, isn't it? In the British Empire of the time, you weren't shit if you weren't the right class, or kind of British dude.

And Gods forbid you be Irish, let alone Black or First Nations or from the Indian Subcontinent.

And the worst part is, there's some people ain't learned a goddamn thing since.

You want things to be better? You have to make them better, ain't nobody going to do it for you. People expected Donald Trump to just insult and yell at some people and thought somehow magically they'd get whatever they wanted. How did that work out for any of us?

For nearing a quarter-million of us now, all it got a whole bunch of Americans was dead. Yet I read last night that the hardest-hit COVID areas overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

How's that working out now?

I'm tired of the same old shitty conspiracy theories with no basis in reality, the same old shitty fear, held by cowards who've never so much as bothered to step up and do anything difficult or face anything, because it's easier to outsource that sort of thing to somebody else, and then just ignore them when they tell you something you don't want to hear. I for one am goddamned tired of being "Thanked for my service" by people who could give a shit about the country, or the Constitution, or the freedoms, rights, and values, that I swore to defend on behalf of ALL Americans.

And please note that I was a young conservative at the time. Apparently those words meant something else back then.

And from the bottom of my heart, through the lens of that experience, I have to say I'm tired of seeing essential workers, or medical personnel or political leaders or aged Supreme Court Justices be put on another imaginary pedestal while they continue to do the work of life in the face of horrible, unnecessary adversity on behalf of people who could give a fuck about them, who too often don't want to do the work of life themselves.

And here's the thing; I can see it coming for the cops, now that they've been proven to be unable to suppress change.

I'm tired of ignorant, lazy, racist stupid motherfuckers who would rather make up wild assed conspiracy theories than simply face our observable reality...which is quite hard enough without making up new problems. I'm tired of people who'd rather hate than eat, who'd rather kill and steal than be alive, whose only recourse given the fact that they can't is to imagine some kind of epic special life that will be there just for them when all their "enemies" or the people they don't like have all been killed or enslaved.

I call it "Immanentizing the Conservative Eschaton."

But it doesn't work like that.

You still have to do the work, and be able to show your work. You want to make America great again? GREAT! You see some trash thrown on the ground? Pick that shit the fuck up! You see somebody doing a crime? Let somebody know. Somebody in the government doing something? Maybe your ass should find out for yourself what it is before you go off into crazy land or go out and hurt somebody. You want shit to get done? Do it! If there's work to do at your work, do that shit too, you're being paid to be there anyway. If you see somebody being bullied, help them. If you see someone less fortunate, obey the words of your own supposed Lord and Savior and give that person a hand up.

You gotta do something, not outsource that shit to other people.

I've known way too many people, many of them supposedly conservative and religious, whose only real skills are cashing government checks and hating on their neighbors, but these same people will go to their Holy Roller church and listen to some dumb person mouthing random nonsense and then get up there and testify how God blessed them because they cashed their welfare check that morning.

But then they get mad and act all judgmental if somebody else gets any, especially if that person is a person of Color or a white woman with mixed-race kids.

That's not what I was taught, I was taught better than that, in church, by people who were Christians and conservatives back when those words meant you were something other than a bigot and if you cannot understand this, then I cannot help you and frankly after the last five years I've no wish to try.

If you cannot show mercy to others, and win or lose with grace, all the time not just when it is convenient or suits your mood...well, fuck you. The Good Book says that as you sow, so shall you reap.

And some people really need to reap the fucking whirlwind.

If you want to have a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

This is your country, my fellow American. This land is your land, this land is my land. From California to the New York Islands. If you can't stand up for it, and elect leaders worthy of it, and follow the values we all are supposed to embody then what the fuck are you even doing here?

'Cause I'll tell you one thing for sure. Those of us who've stood up and held back the fall of night for these last five years, a lot of us are real damn tired right now.

The next time it might be your turn, and there are people for whom you will never be conservative enough, or white enough, because their grievance or their hate or their lust for power is endless and ever-shifting.

Eventually, you're gonna have to.

I've been overseas, I've seen such things as mass graves, and burned out tanks rusting in the desert and I've seen the kind of world some of these fucking people think they want to live in.

I've been to a bombed out, burned up country where there ain't much health care except whatever the United Nations doctors can do, where religious leaders from other nations demand conversions to fundamentalist religions like Salafist Islam as a condition for aid and then sodomize little boys when they think no one is looking, and where there ain't no women's rights and there's damned few men left to do as men ought and protect the women, because the country and constitution that guaranteed them is only so much ash and rubble, and the men died fighting in the war, or were massacred for no fucking reason worth mentioning. 

I've spoken to many people from places far worse than the little bit of Bosnia that I saw...because there's people that don't even have the peacekeepers or the UN aid or the peace agreements.

Several of my friends and a couple relatives would later go on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they saw much worse things, and where they were warfighters, not peacekeepers.

Civilization is a fragile thing, I hope we've learned that.

The fall of night is ever-present.

To hold it back, you have to be the light, as best you can.

This is your country. Not Donald Trump's, not belonging to any fool who bellows "Follow Me!" and then takes your shit...or your life...either through negligence or with malice aforethought.

According to what I was taught you got to be worth being followed. Leadership is hard, citizenship is hard, Truth can be a tough thing to face.

But if we don't, we may just wake up one day and find that this is not our country as surely as Americans did when Redcoats occupied Boston, or Charles Town, or New York.

This is your country. But you gotta keep it that way.

Not by evil deeds, exclusion and hate, but by compassion, fortitude and generosity.

And let's not forget Justice. That's going to have to come, too.

Together, we rise.

Or none of us do.

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