Summer and the Moon of Justice
Thursday gratefuls: The loft. Amber, a smart nurse. Anti-fungal powder. Curative foam. Ruby. Her air conditioning. Freeways: Hwy 285, 470, 70. Wadsworth Blvd. Wheatridge. Kate, her equanimity. Kep. Rigel. All my zoom connections. Books. The internet.
Doom-scrolling. Just did a bit, trying to read the tea leaves. No flying cars. No neon-washed nightscapes. No replicants, no replicant bounty hunters. Blade-Runner days and nights. The reality of 2020, a year after the 1982 movie’s dystopian version of Los Angeles, is so much grimmer. So much darker. So much worse.
The President of this version of 2020 chose the midst of a pandemic to push a case to the Supreme Court that would take health care away from millions. He’s also chosen this time to unfreeze executions in the Federal Prison system. His administration has children in cages, supports white supremacy and white supremacists, thinks Black Lives Matter is a hate group. The chaotic White House response to the worst pandemic of this millennia has killed thousands of Americans and led us to the number one position in the world for new cases, now over 65,000 a day. With no Federal activity to slow it down, let alone stop it.
The election in November. He’s way behind, that orange festooned buffoon. Or, so say the polls. But we all have poll shock, having been gulled once. Gulled once, shame on us… Just read a Politico article that said one problem with polling potential Trump voters is that they don’t usually vote. They come out for him only, and hang up on pollsters.
Doom-scrolling is not necessary. The headlines of each day’s newspapers scream the dysfunction of this once confident, world-leading nation. George Will had a column yesterday in the Washington Post titled, The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come. WP. It’s last line is, “This is what national decline looks like.”
Let’s call it red hat irony. The man who campaigned on making America great has gutted us. Stripped away our credibility with foreign allies. Defended our Cold War enemy against election meddling charges and ignored its pay for slay reinsertion of itself in Afghanistan. He has let a pandemic run wild among our people while stiff arming the poor, the needy, the teeming masses yearning to be free. His pandemic policy might accomplish his goal of reducing immigration down to almost zero.
This country. My home. Probably your home. Its flag, my flag. Its military, my military. Its people, my people. Its beautiful, majestic land, my land. Why wouldn’t we all have tears streaming down our faces as we see it now, in retreat, many of us in self-imposed exile in the nation of our own home?
This is not the American Century, nor the American Millennia. Hell, we couldn’t achieve an American Week or Day. Let’s hope that the old cliche holds, that things are darkest before the dawn. We can’t see ahead right now and that’s pretty damned dark.