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The Year Ahead 2017

In "The Year Back"--an earlier post--
I was trying to escape the fact 
that we had just elected ... I am trying not to say ...
"a narcissistic pig" to be our President.

The man who would be President,
who will be President,
is an embarrassment when he talks about women,
a cruel tyrant when he talks about immigrants,
a manipulative liar when he talks about human equity,
and an ignoramus when he talks about political realities.

And we elected him.

Already, he has changed my life.
Even while admitting that it is a self-mutilating thing to do,
I have withdrawn into a smaller place to live,
unwilling to be a participant in everyday small talk
with people who really do want to build a wall,
who think that being American is being White, Christian, and male,
who believe that God specially blesses America
and think that government of the people,
by the people, and for the people, is impossible
unless the people are White, Christian, and male,
and the government does nothing.

The Republican Party is a mess.
The Democratic Party is a mess.

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate
to the stormy present.  The occasion is
piled high with difficulty, and we
must rise with the occasion.
As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew.
We must disenthrall ourselves,
and then we shall save our country."

The first Republican President said that.

The Republican Party is a mess because what is left of it
after ceding its name to Donald Trump
is having an affair with racism, sexism, and unbridled wealth.
The Democratic Party is a mess because
after building the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
it never noticed that our whole economy shifted
to something about as big as the whole world.

I do not want to talk inanely with people
who still want to fight the Civil War,
nor who think that governing ourselves
deliberately
is an obscenity.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate.
The occasion is piled high with difficulty,
and we must rise with the occasion.
We must disenthrall ourselves.

I do not want to talk inanely this year.
I want to talk quietly about disenthralling ourselves
from the dogmas of the past,
not even when those dogmas are sensitive,
but especially when they are painful,
because only then will we save our country.




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