to a country that doesn’t exist, a fascist state where men are men and women are pretty and guns and money are plentiful if you’re white and the rest of us are just targets for their lust for rapine and blood. Not a pretty place, the America of their dreams.
Whatever a patriot is, I’m clearly not one.
My ancestors sailed to this place before it was a "country." They
fought in every war. They founded cities and plowed farms and built houses and
branded cows and sweated and gave birth and died and were buried in graves from
Yorktown to California and all points between.
At the University of Oklahoma, the son of a dustbowl rancher
and the daughter of kings met and married and had me. They brought the secrets
and trauma of generations to an unhappy home and eventually divorced, leaving
me a latchkey child who walked home alone after school and listened to The Who and
The Cars and Led Zeppelin as loud as my transistor radio would go.
I escaped into the Army where I low crawled and sweated and
worked my way to a sergeant’s rank, traveling around the world and spying on the
USSR in the senseless game we called the Cold War.
I raised horses and I raised children and hiked and biked
and drove the roads and trails and forests and deserts of America. I slept under a sky
full of shooting stars while park service mules grazed beside me. With trembling
legs I stumbled over stones and boulders and sloshed through mud and manure to
stand on mountains covered with spring flowers and icy cold creeks and a
million black flies biting. I’ve crawled out of an frosted tent on a frozen
morning to wrap numb fingers around a metal cup of steaming coffee and watch
with silent awe the morning dance of deer and birds and prairie and sky.
Now in my middle years, I watch my children grown and facing
an uncertain future, and I remember me at 19, full of life and power and dreams
as wide and wild as a Montana morning, and I hover between tears and rage. Rage
at the ever-diminishing horizon for opportunity and joy in a broken economy in
a dying world. Rage at the greedy bastards who stole that from us. Rage at all
the people who refused to see the obvious until it was probably too late.
And still I do my work and raise my horses and tighten my
fences and plant the seeds and gather the eggs and stack the hay and force my
not-quite-as powerful-as-it-used-to-be-but-still-game body onto the treadmill
or rowing machine or bike and try to quiet my mind with burning lungs and
sweat.
Tonight I’ll go to bed and read some silly mystery until my body
finally forces my brain to sleep.
I’ll get up tomorrow to a purring lap cat. I’ll drink a
steaming cup of coffee and pull on my barn coat and walk across sparkling
frosty grass to the eager morning neighing of horses. The sky over the barn
will be pink and lavender and full of birds.
But the joy that should be there will be flattened and
forced. Because hate and greed and ignorance are winning. Because my children
cannot dream and fly.
I’m an American, but I’m not a patriot. I’m just a human
being. Standing here on a muddy frozen farm in Virginia.
A human being who’s forgotten how to cry.
