Ah, America! You possessor of lands and minds!
You want your reality to be California, circa 1960. Malibu, with uncrowded, peeling right-hand waves. Safe streets and shores. A solitary drive from San Onofre to Carlsbad on a summer Saturday night, top down. Stars could still be seen ashore in those days, especially when the Santa Ana winds blew. With cheap gas and surface ideals that didn’t require introspection, there was no hint of anything like scarcity.
And words like “jihad” were yet unknown.
Long before Nature could add flesh to the bones of both the creative ease and the implicit horror of your ideals, you came bearing gifts. Asking refuge and passage from the Keepers of the Land — and just enough space for wagon wheels on the vast prairies — you made your way West. You asked no permission of the winds that brought thunder, however. You just came, as if it were your inherent right to do so in any manner you could. This worked, for a time.
Ah, America! Long before you knew that you could never possess your way to sainthood, you mistook the abundance of this fallow continent for God’s approbation of both the idea of your greatness and the way you implemented your visions.
Yet, your embrace of the idea of freedom has proven to be inconclusive; exclusive to some by birthright and to others only by the tedious, clunky and bloody declaration of cultural laws, only some of which become civil.
Ah, America! As sacred as the concept of Freedom is, you got some of it right. More than any other government before you, your Founding Fathers (who knew something of oppression), were largely able put aside some of their self-interests for a greater vision. They advertised Freedom to any who made their way to this land. For a while, those who were squashed in the desperate rush were silenced. But Life has a way of flushing out the last implied mite of intention.
Since this is the case, the invoice for your careless application of a sacred concept has finally arrived. And the due date is imminent.
Your sunny California has become a cesspool, overcrowded and homeless, polluted, confused and gentrified. America once had leaders who spoke with a command of the language, and the language of Freedom. Though imperfect, these early leaders embodied a form of the values they claimed to espouse.
It has now elected a reality TV host to lead it – one incapable of even the pretense of virtue. This is karma to the utmost degree. Worse, he is supported by the supposed Keepers of Virtue on this land, her religious leaders. Nothing more needs to be said about where America now finds herself.
It is now up to those who truly value freedom for all to correct this path, so that those who desire it are able to create their lives at their whim, as was the original stated intention.
Ah, America! Your once-fertile shores long again to teem with the sea life from which the ancestors of Humanity herself once emerged.
May you mine fewer of the terrestrial resources that thrive beneath the sacred soils of this ancient land. May you instead unearth more of your deepest intentions, your dreams and the genesis of your multifaceted desires, and compare them to Truth in the light of day.
May you be free with all and familiar with all, and may the Love which is the fabric of God once again be the rule of law upon this land.
Ah, America! May you one day become as great as the land upon which you once thrived.
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