Charlie Bicycle

When I have fleeting thoughts of my son fighting a new civil war and I find myself as saddened as I have been at the state of the nation as of late, my heart drops a bit. I’ve never felt this way before. After years of rebelling against my parents and trash talking a government that I truly didn’t understand, I’m finally at a point where I know enough that I have to begin to question wether or not this is the beacon that I’ve always been told it is. I’m sorry mom and dad. I know that you’ve always wanted me to simply believe and to blindly honor a place and a time when this country’s people stood up for what was right and fought back a true evil in the world. I really want it to be those times again. When we were met with a common cause that challenged us all to look beyond our differences and do what was right, not only for ourselves, but for what was good for humanity.

Now, as a nation, we again face great, great challenges. We’ve been driven down the road of financial ruin by pure greed, we’ve been faced with a movement of people that want to see the downfall of America through religious extremism, we’ve used war as a way to protect our energy interests under the veil of protecting the American people from WMD, we’ve faced a long period of great, almost perverse, prosperity for the priviledged while many suffer among us, we’ve been lied to by our own government over and over and over again, we’ve been manipulated by media and special interests, and now, with all of these things still looming on the horizon, we turn on each other with vitriol and our own brand of extremism. It scares me.

With all of pain in this country already, we seem determined to pour salt in our own wounds. My ideas of right and wrong may be very different than many out there. I choose not to depend on some brand of moral or financial superiority to form my ideas on the policies I support, but I know that many out there do. My challenge to that is just that—a respectful challenge. What hurts my heart is when a minority of people are capable of so much fear and hatred that they are willing to destroy any attempt to move our country into a more sustainable and responsible direction simply because their ideology doesn’t allow shades of gray. It reminds me of the Taliban. It reminds me of Al Qaeda. And it embarrasses me to no end.

This is where I fight with my own sense of patriotism. I see people on my T.V. that scream at their fellow citizen because they don’t agree with them, carry machine guns to Presidential events, and in general, look like loons. I hear people on the radio blatantly use the airwaves to lie to their listeners in order to accomplish their narrow vision of the country. I read numerous comments on Facebook that sound more like radical extremism than a dialogue that would make the founding fathers proud. Am I supposed to be like this in order to be a patriotic citizen? Do I have to reduce myself to childish tactics in order to be heard? Will, what I worked SO hard to accomplish, be diminished by a hateful fringe that simply wants failure?

If this is what we’ve been reduced to as a country, I don’t want anything to do with it. If, as a country we are so weak and ignorant as to allow these things to happen, I can only shake my head as the lion is reduced to a cowardly cat. But if we’re truly as great of a nation as we claim, cooler, more moderate heads will prevail, and we’ll rise to the occasion to face down the tremendous challenges that we face as a united people, push the fringe to the fringe, and bring the conversation back to a place that doesn’t put fear and hatred before tolerance and cooperation.