America, America! I don't know what to say.

One year ago, I wrote a straggling trail of words – a poem, perhaps – attempting to make sense of what was happening at the U.S. capitol. I was deeply frightened: by the swarming, feverish hordes seen on video, by the lack of precedent for such an event, by the possible outcomes. As I wrote stumblingly – on the floor of the living room, a live broadcast of what was happening playing in the background – other fears were lurking in my mind and bleeding out onto the page. The accelerating destruction – both vast and minute – of the natural world, which we are not doing enough to curb. The increasingly volatile and angry divide between political parties and people. The COVID-19 pandemic, with a horrifyingly high worldwide death toll …

Today, it’s a new year, but none of those things – those crises – have gone away. What am I, what are we supposed to do with that? I don’t know, and sometimes I want to wash my hands of it all, but, no. No, I simply cannot help but see that we are in this mess – these many messes – because we are all, together, human, for better and for worse. So, I give the following words as a rage, a rant, but also an honest-to-goodness prayer that we can knock it off and be there for each other. We can, I know we can. Now is as good a time as any to start trying.
 
~ Bee, January 6, 2022

1/6/2021

If we’re going down, I guess I didn’t expect it to be this way.
Funny, maybe I should’ve – but here’s what I’d like to know:
What does this mean for our country’s Sanity, its Mental Stability, its Democracy?
When there are people that mad, that scared and they aren’t us out there,
How do we live?
When there are people who will embrace Hypocrisy because they feel Democracy has abandoned them
How do we live?
When I am as scared as they are, and maybe for the same reasons, but neither I nor they see it,
How do we live?
I don’t know, and I am scared that grown-ups, that the adults who have supposedly got us, don’t actually got us and are just as scared as I am –
I am scared that we are all so scared that we won’t be able to agree or see each-other within the Light of Civility before it is too late, and we are all –
gone.
I am afraid that wrongs that we – or our parents, or our parent’s parents or long-ago people we aren’t even related to – committed will never be righted before we are not even a memory in the Eyes of the Universe.
I am afraid, and they are afraid too – but the most frightening thing is that we cannot share that fear because we are TOO AFRAID.
How can anybody expect us to believe – in Religion, in Democracy, in Love, Civility, damn Humanity, when we see this?
I don’t know, I don’t know, and it seems that I’m not the only one who doesn’t.
I wonder (and am afraid to wonder) how this will all turn out?
Sometimes that seems the only way I can get a real – Perspective – on my life, your life, this life – by saying, “what will this be in 10 years, 50, 100,000?”
So, what will this be in the coming year, and the year after that, and when I am old?
Please let it not be The End of something that was already bittersweet,
Unless it could be a New Beginning, A People At Last United,
Please say that we deserve a little Stability, a little Future
When it seems that so many are hellbent on taking that away
Who am I even talking too? Technology? God?
I cannot say – I don’t… know.
But at times like these, it seems that all we, I, can do is pray –
Pray that there will be peace
Pray that there will be understanding
Pray that there will be a laying down of arms
Pray, pray so hard for a future that WORKS
So that nobody stands outside the Capitol because they believe that America can be made Great like it never was before,
So that my brother, who is nine, gets to live through a coming four years that are Boring, and Effective, and Honest instead of an apocalypse of Lies and Horror and Anger
I wanna believe that America is so much better than this…
So please – show me that this is not as much a hopeful lie as it seems today.
 
This is what I write today on January the 6th, 2021, as a mob of MAGA supporters siege the US Capitol