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Bare Trees in Fog

This is not your Mother's America!

Writer's picture: Marie LaureMarie Laure

Or even your Grandmother's if you were born after Y2K, one year before 9/11, the day like no other that left its mark on the American psyche. Never forget became the rallying call to never allow such an atrocity to happen in the homeland again. A whole generation grew up in that shadow. Never forget belongs as much to them as to those who suffered loss of loved ones because their loss was that of innocence.


I'm thinking today about my my grandchildren and my daughter who will celebrate her birthday four days after the Fourth of July, the day all Amercans celebrate hard-won freedom fought for by other generations who refused to be oppressed by a King in another land.


Their refusal created a country of freedoms that some of us have enjoyed like none other. Birthing freedom required long and hard labor pains. Your mother or grandmother can tell you how long she labored giving birth because she will never forget. Ask her! Some things stick forever in our minds. Some things that should never be forgetten succumb over time under the weight of life events.


I, like you, have memories that I will never forget, no matter what. Still, the most significant and meaningful and needed and important and sacred truths are dangerously close right now to being forgotten in this "land of the free" in 2024.


We have forgotten so much of who and what we were becoming, and are coming so close to forgetting who we are as Americans. Waving the flag right side up or upside down is not the point. Having a flag is the point! Generations upon generations have stood up for that flag on too many battle fields around the world to let it have been for nothing. There will be others as we sadly know. Nobody should give their life in vain: To lose our freedoms on top of losing loved ones who fought for those freedoms for us is undemocratic. It is my contention that if mother's had charge of the world, all war would cease: No mother would agree to send her children to die.


Our mothers and grandmothers know a lot about hard won freedoms. The generations raised by these women have benefited greatly, until recently, from their efforts to gain rights they believed were meant for all, not just for some. By the time I was my daughter's age of 33, I had more rights than women who had led the way: I was educated, I was in the workforce, I was paid at least a minimum wage. Today's granddaughters and daughters have been on a backward slide from where I started five decades ago. Worse though, is how they started from a point of lost innocence. To be sure, when my sisters and mother and grandmother and I shared this earth together there were global threats. But, we knew, or thought we knew where those real threats were lurking far from home as they had always.

( Of course, it must be said that being in the white majority gave a sense of false security that others understood differently from threats faced here at home.) As I came of age, we knew who the "good guys and bad guys" were and where. I remember vividly the nuclear arms race with Russia and the S.A.L.T. (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) for which I slapped a bumper sticker on my car for the first and only time. That was a foreseeable real threat that opened my innocent eyes to possible dangers to my homeland. When you are young and feel threatened the loss of innocence is at stake. When older, threats against everything held dear with the benefit of hindsight can be paralyzing. An alternative to facing grave fear is flight.


Traveling again across the ocean the past two summers, I have noticed the same scenarios in Germany as in the UK that I see in the US. "We the people" are living it up! Yes, COVID was a killer in every way, and the backlash is still being sorted through from work-life to leisure. Yet, for all the whining about a bad economy, we are out in the restaurants and bars and shopping at break-neck speed for luxuries. We are living it up while the world burns up and the migrants float over (if they're lucky), and the courts defer cases against an ex-President who wants his old job back in the next few months! The highest court in our homeland, shocking even conservatives, has given him a leg up in their ruling of immunity against his own misdeeds that threatened our democracy in real time. RBG must be rolling over in her grave. The founders would be rolling over in their graves to see how perilously close to the edge we have come to losing all that they believed to be "our sacred Honor:" ". . . We hold these truths to be self evident . . .A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people". If in her wise and courageous dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor had written the word "Tyrant" rather than "King", violations against the Constitution on January 6, 2020 would have been crystalized forevermore.


There is no other summer in my lifetime, or our country's, that has been on the verge of losing all the rights and freedoms fought for and won, over two and half centuries. Yet, we are off to the beach as if this might be our last chance for "the last perfect summer". As the poet wrote in the summer of 1914 ". . .summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division"* History shows that those who died in WWI and II had lived it up while they could as if what was ahead could be forestalled. We should know better. We do know better. When we look in our hearts we know all that will be forgotten if we cease to be a Democracy. There comes a moment when you feel the sea change, hear the tectonic plates moving under the ground you call home. This is such a moment. Never forget this day for it might not come again in our lifetime, or the lives of our daughters and granddaughters.


*Thomas Hardy, After a Journey






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Guest
Jul 03, 2024
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Indeed!! So many of my loved ones, family, friends, acquaintances are reticent to look ahead. I myself choose to live in this present moment. Whenever I speak with anyone,

I hear repeatedly...we are in a very dark and bad place, we have no hope for this to improve or have resolution. Here at home with our families,

We ponder "Will we experience a civil war in this country? Very soon? Will our children get drafted to soldier this war?"

I hear and feel a palpable fear amongst us. Allowing fear into our hearts and minds is a choice.

I believe it is not a wise choice. I choose hope. I believe there are more good people than bad. My chosen…

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Marie Laure
Marie Laure
Jul 03, 2024
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You have spoken wise words. Thank you!

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© 2023 by Marie Laure

​Six Stages of Pilgrimage:

  • The Call:

  • The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

  • The Separation:

  • Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

  • The Journey:

  • The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain and sacrifice of the journey itself.  This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

  • The Contemplation:

  • Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation like walking a labyrinth.

  • The Encounter:

  • After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling and blisters, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin veil where humans live in concert with the Creator.

  • The Completion and Return:

  • At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world. "Seeing the place for the first time . . ."

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