RANDOM THOUGHTS OF A CRONE
I’m struggling to feel good today—or even okay. All around me are celebrations of my county’s freedom—Independence Day, Fourth of July! Yet all I see are those precious freedoms slipping though our fingers.
I’m not celebrating our “Great America” today. I’m not setting eyes on any parade, especially one that appropriated tax dollars to ego stroke the interloper in the people’s house.
I don’t want to see or hear any celebratory fireworks—representative of the gallantly streaming ramparts. Not when an American war hero now laid to rest is repeatedly ridiculed by a petulant trust fund baby, the so called Commander in Chief, not half the man of any U.S soldier.
I will not celebrate when brave men who risked their lives on 911 must stand before congress, shadows of their former selves, eaten by cancer, and beg that their health coverage not end; their words fall on the deafest ears of a corrupt majority leader.
I will not celebrate when children are being caged and treated like animals at our borders, when instead they could be processed out to relatives already living here, to foster care, to many people who would temporarily take them in and treat them with compassion.
I’m not celebrating when Congress appropriates money to expand facilities and improve conditions in these kiddie concentration camps. Not when these facilities are part of this country’s for profit industrial prison complex that unjustly incarcerates marginalized people to maintain their money-making head counts.
Not when the interloper and a Supreme Court Judge have been accused of sexual assault and their accusers have been dragged through the mud, received death threats, and are left with a life in ruin.
Not when veterans who fought for our freedoms are homeless in the streets, and we spend millions on a bullshit parade for a fake president so he can impress the murdering dictators of the world whom he believes are fine people.
Not when children live in poverty within our own borders and we cannot feed, clothe or care for them with tax dollars, but will stop at no expense to protect those not yet born, not yet hungry, not yet naked or cold or sick . . . right up until the moment they are born and become hungry, naked, cold and sick.
Not when single mothers are shamed as immoral sluts and welfare queens, while men pass laws that will force all fertile women to bear children. Not when a pregnant woman sits in jail because the bullet from somebody else’s gun killed her unborn child and she is deemed the guilty one.
Not when judges slap the hands of rich white boy rapists to preserve their promising futures, while throwing the victim and a good deal of her hope for a promising future to the dogs.
Not when innocent people of color are shot down in the streets, in their own yards, in their own cars.
Not when the blood of those who gave their lives to secure our freedoms cries out from the grave and is denied.
Not when the poor, the sick, the minorities and the marginalized are fodder for the GOP Corporate money machine, fed into the grinder to churn out the God Almighty Dollar for the rich.
I will not celebrate America and her freedoms today. I will mourn the loss of both and conjure whatever force—in whatever name or names—that might still exist for good, for decency, for compassion, and for justice to rise up and smite all the corrupters and corrupted.