I am an ordinary American: an older woman, born into a working class family. I’ve raised two children alone, completed a 40 year career in nursing and now have retired into a simple, frugal life as a senior with disabilities. I am enjoying the freedom of having time, at last, or pursue interests such as politics.
After discovering the world of political blogs and CSpan some years back, I turned into a political junkie totally fascinate by all I’ve learned. I’ve been through all the common stages of reaction, from anger to outrage to determination to fight back however I could, to discouragement, even despair, only to find myself freshly outraged and more determined to fight, around and around and around I’ve gone, along with most of the people I know here on the blogs.
Until now, that is.
For some time now, omething within me seems to have stopped cycling, leaving me in a strange state of detached awareness that simply isn’t going away. This is my honest attempt to identify this state of being I find myself in.
I no longer think this government, as it is now, can be fixed. I see it as a structure so riddled by the cancer of corruption it cannot survive much longer. This cancer of greed and addiction to power and wealth has metastasized to all of it vital organs and it has clearly progressed too far to ever be cured.
This sense of “detached awareness” I feel within, is exactly like the feeling I know so well as a nurse, when we knew we’d done all we could do for someone, and there was nothing left but to stand by and allow death it’s turn.
I have no more hope that those within either established political party, even those who may still have the greater good of America in their hearts, can do anything to change things. Not when the powerful leadership of both parties have clearly succumbed to the same terminal disease.
Yes. This is where I am now, sitting by the bedside of this dying democracy. There is sadness of course, but after you’ve sat as many death watches as I have, you come to see death differently. It is not always JUST a tragedy or a terrible, loss of something that can never be replaced. Yes, it is the end of that particular body that will no longer exist on this earth in the form it pmce did.
But every life now gone leaves many echoes and footprints behind. Memories of the suffering, so acute at first, do fade, leaving behind the effects of all of the good that body stood for, and did, in its allotted time. People remember these. People use these footprints and echoes in ways that can make them stronger, wiser, and healthier.
I don’t know exactly how our democracy, as we know it, will draw its last dying breath. It could just quietly expire unnoticed for awhile. Or it could go out in the blast of a mushroom cloud that will take us all with it. Or in a myriad of ways in between these. This seems to be an outcome out of any hands powerful enough to stop it, as it seems to me right now.
Yet even this would not be the end. For every one of many hundreds of deaths it’s been my privilege to share over all these years, there are new births in equal or greater numbers, happening everywhere, bringing new life, new hope, new beginnings.
And for every death, there are families who survived it, and become stronger than they were before.
If this democracy must die, as a member of it’s family who has loved it dearly, I will indeed sit here and accompany it out, while honoring all that it has given to me and mine along it’s long way. I will celebrate its dreams attained, and its dreams not yet accomplished, and draw strength from the example of its life, for the days to come and the work ahead.
I will shed my tears, then get on with gathering up the echoes and footprints it has left behind, and put them to good use in the next attempt to birth a new democracy that can and will remain healthy and strong. That there will be another such birthing, I have no doubt at all, as long as enough authentic Americans remain alive.
With that, I feel the beginnings of peace, and the rebirthing of hope that I was seeking.
(x-posted from OurWord.org.)
