What Will Become Of My Beautiful America?

America is the country that saved my grandmother, uncle and father from the last days of the concentration camps in World War II and allowed my mother's family the chance to rise from lives as dirt-poor Russian immigrant peasants to free, educated people.

It is on the this piece of earth that I, myself, have been allowed me to find a life-partner, birth two healthy children and make a decent living thinking up and writing down stories, which, in my eyes, is beyond a luxury.

But THAT is all in the past.

People are already losing their jobs and their homes, which is the economic manifestation of having so badly and completely and overwhelmingly lost our priorities and ideals.

Lost our country.

Lost our country that I love.

And yet... I am truly hopeful.

Every time this country has gotten punched in the jaw... something glorious and unexpected has happened.

The horror of the civil war begat the Emancipation Proclamation.

The suffering of the great depression brought us FDR and the New Deal.

The blood of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Dr. Martin Luther King, President John Kennedy and thousands upon thousands of unnamed others was the unfortunate oil necessary to finally open the door to the Civil Rights Act.

See, every time we LOSE "modern" America, we seem to FIND the America that was enacted, if not envisioned, by our founding fathers, who wrote that, "All men are created equal," even if, at the time, their definition did not... could not... be as broad and all-encompassing as we will continue to make it.

For months and months I have, on odd Sunday mornings, turned to my wife and asked... "Is it really possible that we'll actually elect a black man President of the United States?"... and on most of those mornings her response has been a shrug of the shoulders and an unconfident smile.

But on this Sunday morning I sat at the end of the bed, waiting for the sun to come up and realized that I no longer had to ask the question at all.

"Yes, we will elect a black man President of the United States as well as a Congress strong enough to enact an agenda and we will, as we have always done before... despite what we've just done to ourselves... begin the latest version of the search for the country that I love so much."

We've shot ourself in the foot, but our short history indicates that such action is often the unconscious act of a people who know they've fallen into a coma and are on the verge of slipping into the void.

We are starting to wake up, this country that I love, and I, for one, am glad to be hear to see it.