Posted by
beltway girl on Sunday, November 02, 2008 2:12:54 AM
"In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
America now hangs on a precipice. With the blood of our wars running into our eyes, with our economy collapsing down upon our heads, with our women on hospital beds, having their children sucked out of their wombs to be disposed of in back-alley dumpsters, with our disenfranchised shooting each other in the streets and leaving each other to die, with our homeless finding leftover fast-food remnants like donuts and hamburgers where the dismembered pieces of a human being were left to lie, in peace of some sort.
And this is America. This is America.
It is too late to pass it by in your car if you have come down this alley. It is too late to say it existed in some day, long gone past, and gone by now, and done away with, and reckoned with by some blind, just eye. It is too late to say you didn't notice the thrown-away condoms out by the grade-school playground, it is too late to lose yourself and your children in some spot halfway between this ground and the sky, bought now by AIG, or the local welfare agency. Is it too late for America? Because this is America.
It is too late to pretend we didn't hear the children cursing each other in the street. It is too late to pretend we don't know this is grown-up trick-or-treat now, and every vote counts. It is too late to make-believe that infanticide doesn't count, that someone who tried to bomb the Pentagon is a friendly revolutionary, that abortion is a sound choice for the twenty-first century. But this is America. This is America.
It is too late for you to ignore the forces now subsuming your nation. It is too late for sublimination, and it is too late for racism. But that rule counts on both sides, that rule counts on your side, too.
This is America. This is America.
It is too late to pretend the sixties aren't with us. It is too late to ignore the slaves of the sexual revolution. It is too late for the deaths from AIDS, the postponed Birth of a Nation, done wrong before, now done right by the birth of an integrated nation. Real Black Empowerment, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, and information, and confirmation, and subordination of what was an ugly mark before.
This is America. This is America.
It is too late to say we must wake up when we have never been asleep. It is too late to say our situation is acceptable. It is too late when the wounds are this deep and the knife is forever pushed down further, but no obstacle is insurmountable when you are an American.
This is America. This is America.
And its heart keeps beating in the ghetto storefront chapel, in the tree-lined avenue, in the Catholic grottos, in the Protestant Bible Study, in the plain-brick synagogue, in the shopping mall cul-de-sac, in the back of the mini-van, in the Mason lodge, in the urban barrios, and in the seats of our souls, in the cradle of our civilization, in the bowels of our nation, and in our wombs.
Please vote this Tuesday.
God Bless the United States of America.