American Dreams
The holidays are past and there is New Year’s Eve left, where those who had to hold their tongues at the dinner table can drink their stresses away, and those that couldn’t help themselves can reassure themselves that they were in the right. The turkey couldn’t stuff the mouths that couldn’t keep the peace fast enough.
The little jabs, and the nonchalant references, and our insistence upon commenting on that one post. We can’t even talk about pandemics. And the fear, and the fear-mongering. It’s all wrapped up in that forty-eight hour period we call Christmas.
Out on the lawns are Santa Clauses and crosses. There are empty lawns and the last of the political signs still standing in defiance. It seems we all have a point to make, and being holed up in our houses we cannot drive around boasting our bumper stickers in traffic. But the corporate machine rolls on, it just invades our homes now.
There is a divide between fear and the unfortunate. There are the empty slogans that boast “freedoms” and “rights”, and there are the enlightened ones that are teachers but have never been students. There is the ignorant and the stupid, and never the twain shall meet. The common theme is anger, and the common thread is fear.
The holidays are past, but the problems that we all have had to face, separate but together, remain. An answer seems impossible. A solution seems unimaginable. Certainty is inevitable. And yet in the grey corners when the shouting stops and the high horse is simply the pony that it is, and we we look past our tribes and realize that none of this is necessary can we say that we may have been wrong, but we were trying to do right?
