Look Out 'Cause Here It Comes

It's not my nineteenth nervous breakdown. I passed that milepost somewhere last year. In Spring. Since then it's been a series of moments of disbelief coupled with impotent rage while the country that I love has been turned into a Monopoly game. Look at those numbers! Look at that stock market! Look at all this winning!
Not winning here, sorry. Stuck in a morass of competing notions: The ones lauded by Fox News, and the "lies" spread by "Fake News." I would like, at this point, to say that I have always held a certain amount of doubt about everything that I read and see. As it turns out, Darth Vader wasn't really Luke's father. He was an actor in a costume, a guy who lifted weights for a living and also portrayed Frankenstein's Monster. And that wasn't even his voice. It was the Lion King's voice. And Luke was really that kid from Corvette Summer. We live in a swirl of information that needs to be verified.
But here's one thing that you can take to the bank: If you don't like the way things are going, you have a power that doesn't get exercised nearly as often as it should. You can vote. Vote like your life depended on it, since it turns out that it just might.
I am a fan of hyperbole, at least when it comes to exploding angry ideas held mistakenly by those who have spent too long with their heads in the metaphorical sand. Or even actual sand, if that happens to be the case. The suggestion that we are somehow Making America Great Again by creating more divides and widening the gulf between the sliver of haves and the vast majority of have-nots, or that missiles and guns are our best defense in a world that has already normalized the idea of mutually assured destruction scares me. If it scares you, vote.
Vote if you have a conscience and you are tired of being told that all is well as strains of fiddle music can be heard coming from the White House as the country burns. Maybe not all at once, but slowly turned to a cinder by ignoring climate change.
If you have spent just ten minutes in the past two years wondering how things could have taken this ugly turn, vote. Honestly, even if it never occurred to you that things have taken a nasty turn to the right and we are accelerating toward a cliff, take a moment to consider exactly how you want your city, state, county, country to look in ten years. And why not ponder this question on your way to your local polling place? Where you can vote.
That is what makes America great. And has for two hundred forty-two years.