Oh, America

Oh, America

Oh, America. You lay wounded in the blood of your democracy. Beaten by the hands of your own government. Choked by the lawlessness of those sworn to protect your dignity and your existence.

Sirens wail in the streets. The emergency is real. The time is critical. But no one comes to carry you to healing. Nothing is done to repair your injuries. 

Your citizens. Your people. They cry out. They weep. They protest. They walk in the hot sun holding handmade signs for your support. But their protectors, the men and women with badges, they wield clubs, they unload tear gas and shoot rubber bullets. They push citizens back. They shove them to the ground. They walk over them, left unattended as rubbish in the streets.

Justice is trampled with them. 

Judges, Administration officials, Congressmen, even the President, talk endlessly about the crisis. They pretend to care. They hold up the Bible. They say we are all in their prayers. They stand beside the Flag. They use happy words. They make promises. 

But nothing changes. Little lights of hope are snuffed out by giant acts of aggression by the protectors against the unprotected. Assurances of change fail and fall meaninglessly in the streets where the police trained in combat slosh through the blood and the bodies.

The White House, the people’s House, is closed off with fencing and heavily armed police and soldiers. There is no welcome there. Only warnings. Only signs of force. The message clear: Stay away.

Lincoln, heartbroken by a similar scene of massive division, tried his best to woo the nation to peace and unity. No one listened. His words died with him in a theater by the gun of a fiendish and disgruntled complainer who wanted no part of Lincoln’s attempts at consensus. 

Despite all the progress and wealth and skyscrapers and freeways and fast cars and beautiful homes and fine clothes—we still, after all these years, are cursed by the Civil War. We still cannot treat each other as equals. We still are obsessed with White supremacy and the dominion of Blacks.

And so, America staggers from its lacerations, from being choked, from bullets in its vitals. We watch the scenes of this ruination, horrified and bewildered, disheartened and dispirited, and we wonder will we ever, and can we ever, change, so that the freedoms and values we the people claim to own and hold dear, are not just empty phantoms, forever elusive and beyond anything real. 

© 2020 Timothy Moody