It's getting harder all the time to counsel patience, to urge a happy-medium approach, to advise letting wisdom -- not more folly -- be the quiet adult in the room, not while our reality-thrashed inner child strains to be let loose, screaming wild, left shredding the whole house.
We can totter down this road again, but the trip's pretty worthless. Scenery's not changed much, last 20 or 30 years. Road's still strewn with broken bodies, littered with burnt dreams, stacked high with jagged-edged splinters and shards of busted hope, spirit shot from the skies.
Our hearts and our heads are meeting all along this road, more of us all the time, right here -- at the corner of Low Road and High, dazed and scattered, a few bleeding real badly, wondering what it was that has happened, what kind of storm blows through and does that.
Nope, no clues from our leaders -- although, must say, they're all looking fine and quite dapper. Meanwhile, here we all are, stuck in the crapper.
Maybe our karma has looped back like a snake on us, bit us clean through. Somewhere, someplace safe, some alleged people are cooing, "Couldn't happen to me, but it could happen to you."
So, this is our payback, could be, what we all get, for backing such bastards and bullies so long -- showering them in gold, to go make trouble all over this green world, to make red death in our names, under our flag, with these colors we say we hold dear.
Maybe, maybe not. Could be just greed, run wild with hypocrisy, struck dumb and stuffed in its own juices. Or, maybe, something much simpler: that we all took a nap, snoozing soundly, then, all of a sudden, we woke up real fast, to the sounds of gnawing and crunching -- woken up too quick, taken over, overrun with fat rats.
You might think this is old hat, that no America you know is anything like that.
Well, it's a shame to disappoint you, but, this is old hat.