Broke

You have broken my heart, America. Oh, it’s not the first time it’s been broken, not by a long shot, I keep putting that hapless organ out there to be driven over, shot at, left behind … . It’s my own damned fault and I really should know better by now. The problem is that this has been my longest running love affair, going back as far as my memory can reach. I fell even before I knew that there was such a thing as a country.

The soundtrack to that affair was tunes like America the Beautiful, My Country Tis of Thee, This Land Is Your Land, God Bless America, and the like. Songs to stir the blood, to make a child stand taller and straighter at his desk in school.

I didn’t lose faith even when I realized that you had serious flaws, cracks in that beauty revealed by the lynchings, the racism, the wars … the obvious fact that your bounty wasn’t spread around evenly at all.

But this time you broke it. That so many of us could vote for someone so very bad. A Mussolini for our time.

My heart will heal, it always has. But after each fracture and repair, it was not the same as it was before the hurt came along. Sometimes it became a better heart … bigger, more accepting, more capable of love than ever … and that is what I can hope for now. For today, though, all that I want to do is to go somewhere and have a cry.

It will not be the last time that I have been a fool for love, I know. Time has proven that to be my curse and my blessing all at once. But I know that I am not unique in this … maybe some of you are similarly afflicted. I offer a well-distanced and weepy hug if you are.

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Stephen Colbert suited up and showed up and said it much better than I can, in the first 16 minutes of Thursday’s show.

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