There's An Emptiness Here
This was originally posted on Facebook on May 8, 2022 on Mother’s Day in the US.
There's an emptiness here.
I can't tell if it's because Facebook has jacked up their algorithm so much that I feel like I'm whistling into the wind here.
Or maybe it's because it's yet another manufactured holiday... this one supposedly about at least some women even though the holiday is problematic all over the place... in a week when women have been punched in the gut by a major massive institution. After DECADES of progress.
Maybe the emptiness is because I've been watching Ukrainian TV with a voiceover in English showing way more war coverage than our media can be bothered to show these days - unless they're yapping about totally inappropriate intel leaks.
It's weird watching people from other countries go around being multilingual, too, when we're just bumbling Americans barely knowing where anything even is in Europe let alone how to speak any other languages. Almost none of us can afford to travel there. We don't have a lot of extra money in the US for that kind of thing. Most of us, anyway.
Maybe the emptiness is because we haven't been willing to invest in Americans or in American communities for my entire lifetime.
Yet we're expected to be out here thriving and flourishing despite all that.
Clawing our way up the success ladder... even though millions of us start out underwater. And they don't issue scuba gear.
We're expected to keep from drowning... and then to be wildly successful somehow. Bring yourself up by your bootstraps. Cowboy up. Be ruggedly individual and all that.
But we've gutted schools. We're gutting rights. We're gutting democratic processes. We've gutted social support systems all over the place at every level.
The bullies have been winning. The meanies. The fundamentalists. And the advocates of the wealthy.
The minimum wage in this country hasn't changed practically since I was old enough to get a job when I was in high school - well over 30 years ago.
Why can't people get ahead? Gosh it's really a mystery.
Yet CEOs make MILLIONS.
While they can't be bothered to pay their employees enough to even make rent. And also to eat. Without also getting another job.
I'm so freaking sick of it.
I'm freaking sick of the people who refuse to invest in Americans running this damn country.
They have been running it my entire lifetime. They have been driving the agenda.
They did not want to share when they were told it was time to share in the '60s.
So here we are.
This is what decades of not sharing looks like.
This is it.
We have a rotted society.
We have a completely frayed and distressed and threadbare social fabric.
We have a society rife with division and fragmentation.
We have people hanging black flags in their neighborhood that mean they are willing to be violent to their fellow Americans. That's what that means. "No quarter shall be given."
They hang curse words on their porches and plaster obscenities on their vehicles in places where kids can easily see all of it.
How is any of that okay?
It's not.
Yeah, so... at least some of all of that could be why I'm feeling some emptiness.
I'm tempted to write a whole lot more here on how I think we can work on that, but maybe for today it's enough just to say that this is not okay.
And I want something different. I suspect I'm not alone.
How about you?
What's the country you're looking for? Is it this one that we've built? Or do you think we can do better?
How do we counter the empty?