Meditation On America In Late Winter

Dear K,

I've been on a journey backwards through America, and I want to set down some ideas that have been jangling in my head. Our current President disgusts me. I cannot say that in my short lifetime I have seen a man that I despise more take the presidency. I hated George W. Bush with a righteous fervor, with a fever that could only be stoked by the fiery passion of youth. I hated that man for the inglorious wars he started. I still hate him, and now I dearly miss him. More than him I miss our recently departed Barack Obama. I miss feeling like the office of president was held by a man with a cool head and steady hands. Now I feel as if it is held by a screaming infant, shitting in its drawers.

I know any number of people might take issue with this thought. But I do think America is exceptional. You can quote your Zinn at me and recount all the long list of sins committed under the guise of Americanism, and the list will be long and dark and bloody. I think it is a folly to look at American history and see anything but a long and bloody struggle out of darkness, but I think that's the history of mankind as a whole.

I think that what makes America special is not what we are, or who we've been, but who we tell ourselves we could be. The ideal America strives for is a land where each person lives by their talent and sweat. I suppose it's more than that, and has always been more than that. Pioneers didn't settle the land and prosper in vacuums. They joined in together to harvest. I don't know if there's a more powerful metaphor in my mind than farmers coming together to reap.

There's a book I read in college called Witness To The Combines. It is a series of essays and memories written by a man remembering his childhood on a farm in North Dakota. The title essay is about his father's death and the subsequent selling of the family farm. His father died a couple of months before harvest. The family was mostly grown and they all knew they would leave the farm and not take it up themselves, but still they thought they had a couple more seasons together. They needed that last harvest in order to get themselves out of the obligations they had to the land and set their mother up with a house in town. They couldn't do it by themselves. Their neighbors from all over the county came in with their combines and harvested that wheat for them together.

You know we're a republic, and one of the oldest symbols of republics in western civilization is the fasces. Now this symbol was corrupted and twisted by the fascists, which is a real shame. It was an ax surrounded by a bundle of rods. Individually the rods were weak, they would bend and snap and break if they weren't bound together. The symbol is evocative of a sheaf of wheat. The thing that makes us strong is our union, it is the bonds between us that give us strength. Whatever system of government we have, whatever symbols we use, whomever we choose to be, we must never forget that we are individual strands bound together, woven together. Together we are stronger than we are apart.

I hope you are doing well.

Yours,

K