From Where I Stand
Just existing in America. Not going forward, not back, just standing still. Road blocks at every turn and there is no light at the end of this endless tunnel. Can someone please end this tunnel or do I have to do it myself? A generations worth of prose on the tongue but no ears to listen, no one willing too hear what we all know to be true but refuse to confront. We have forgotten how to hear the clarion call of LIFE. We accept cheap imitations, shadows of the original. Hopes deferred until WHAT!?? What are we deferring until? Until life hands you a golden goose egg, until the heavens open up and a deluge of dreams and wishes come true rain down upon your weary and waiting head?
WHAT???!!!
O.K., wait, I know what it is. I missed some critical speech the other 307 million of you tuned in to, right? It’s my fault, I know. I don’t have a television and I missed it. Would someone please tell me WHAT THE FUCK that message said? Must have been some powerful shit to put the whole 307 million of you in a deaf, dumb and blind stupor.
This life is killing me. This country is destroying my spirit. Wearing me down like a river over stone. I look into the eyes of Americans everyday and see a crushed people, a people enslaved to a system that cares nothing, NOTHING, for them nor their best interests.
America will not cease to exist by forces from without its borders, it will die a slow and sad death by what happens from within them. We’ve no need to fear those that hate us abroad as it is our own self-hatred that will eventually do us in.
I know no one, self included, wants to read this. No one wants to hear this. We want to believe that a country so many once immigrated to is still a great place to be born, a great place to live and a great place to be from. But from where I stand (and believe me, the ground I stand on is shaky at best) all I can see is what I have written above.
What about you? What do you see from where you’re standing? Or have you even stopped to think about what you are seeing all around you?
WHAT???!!!
O.K., wait, I know what it is. I missed some critical speech the other 307 million of you tuned in to, right? It’s my fault, I know. I don’t have a television and I missed it. Would someone please tell me WHAT THE FUCK that message said? Must have been some powerful shit to put the whole 307 million of you in a deaf, dumb and blind stupor.
This life is killing me. This country is destroying my spirit. Wearing me down like a river over stone. I look into the eyes of Americans everyday and see a crushed people, a people enslaved to a system that cares nothing, NOTHING, for them nor their best interests.
America will not cease to exist by forces from without its borders, it will die a slow and sad death by what happens from within them. We’ve no need to fear those that hate us abroad as it is our own self-hatred that will eventually do us in.
I know no one, self included, wants to read this. No one wants to hear this. We want to believe that a country so many once immigrated to is still a great place to be born, a great place to live and a great place to be from. But from where I stand (and believe me, the ground I stand on is shaky at best) all I can see is what I have written above.
What about you? What do you see from where you’re standing? Or have you even stopped to think about what you are seeing all around you?
posted by Corey at 7:16 PM
7 Comments:
Yo Cor,
I don't really have an answer. even in another nation with a different worldview, however not different enough sometimes.
Guys like you and me seriously need some hope these days. I feel at risk of spontaneously combusting in rage over the stupidity of the world.
then I crack a beer and go... is it all that bad?
love you man!
Ryan,
I feel you on the rage part. Although I often feel less rage and more heart break at the situation we currently find ourselves in.
It didn't have to turn out this way, but it did.
I just don't know where we go from here. I have a difficult time seeing anything but disaster up ahead.
But you make a good point, when I crack open one of your homemade brews it is easy to feel that all is right in the world :)
Much love to you as well.
You couldn't have said it any better than you just did, Corey. It breaks my heart too that America is resigned to live a disconnected, numb and blindly self destructive life. It's unreal that that is what being "ordinary" is.
I wish you could be in my classes with me. I'm taking courses in community development and by the end of the class, you learn of so many ways to turn communities into true communities away from capitalism but into people relating to people.
Look at this website.. http://familynetwork.org/
it's amazing. The lady who started it came and talked to us. It's people like this who inspire and put hope inside me.
I do not like everything I see around me, but that is why I want to focus my life on trying to empower people and communities.
It's been too long Corey. When are you visiting Seattle?
Kelly,
Yes, "ordinary" in the U.S. is a very scary thing indeed. My friends and i have been having an ongoing dialogue about how Americans have the "luxury" of staying disconnected from the world as we have never really had to be confronted with it.
America is flanked to the East and West by vast bodies of water, to the North by a country that is almost a mini version of us and to the South a country which is too monetarily poor to serve as any real military threat. We in the U.S. are so "safe" that it causes us to never have to mature, never have to grow up and gain a healthy worldview.
As a result, we can stay in an infantile mindset our whole lives.
Jnet,
Hi! nice to hear from you. it's has been too long. I've always loved your optimistic outlook and your willingness to try and make some positive change in the world.
I meet good people all over the U.S. (people like the woman you mentioned) and it's not that these folks arent doing any worth while, i'm just not convinced that what they are doing is worth doing in America. The system is setup to take advantage of people, not help them along.
I'm sure there were good Germans doing wonderful things in pre-Nazi Germany but there came a point when those folks had to take a long hard look at the big picture going on around them and reassess what all of their efforts were really accomplishing.
I'll be in Seattle soon enough.
ummm....what speech?
I guess a system by definition cannot care. A system is just that.
We can't look to a system to care. Perhaps you're looking for something to do something that it can't do and never will. Guaranteed disappointment.
You're not alone in your frustration. Although I think we have differing ideas about what will fix things. I don't think things will really be fixed. Not now.
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