So what can we do?
Oh, there are the protests, and there is plenty of justified bitter vitriol to write and pass on. But, really. What do we do, those of us who are taken aback, feeling left out and worried right down to our cores that the country’s one fascinating and most dependable feature has been fractured to its foundations, and our’s along with it? That feature is its stability. We all get up every day and kind of depend on that stability, in one way or another. We look back, and are still shaken by certain times of potential or real instability, whether we lived them or not. The JFK assassination. WWII. The racial riots of 1968. 9/11. Those events or occurrences shook our own stability because we became afraid that we would not have the enduring lack of foundational fear removed from us by the efforts of generations of Americans that came before. I didn’t go to Vietnam and get my ass shot off for you. I went to assure that stability, or so I believed. You, or someone like you, sent me there to do that because you feared waking up and living in fear, as most of the world does. Every day and every night. But most here don’t know that.

Things have been forgotten and hidden by a compliant media. No news on Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, or even Argentina or Ulaan Baator. Places mostly ignored and hidden away, where fear lives, as in most all of the 194 countries out there For the first time in almost everyone’s history, Americans must begin to band together again. Technology, advancement and naked loads of monetary wealth have allowed a great gulf of distance to be inserted between and among us. We sit at the same table talking on cell phones or working data. We are together and alone. The country has elected and installed a frighteningly dangerous buffoon as its leader. Many will not know of the real danger until the fear begins to return. And it’s out there now, coiling and seething, waiting to be released back on the American human condition.

You can watch some other countries celebrating the fact that America will now get to find out how they live, and that misery very much wants company. Take to the people around you at the coffee shop. At the laundry. At church and at home. By coming together it will be much more difficult to be torn apart. We can weather any storm together, given that past generations built us a damned sturdy ship of state. We owe those people who paid with their lives, spent their lives and now work for their lives to give you what you have. Believe that they gave it to you. Then believe you owe something back.

Talk to me. Talk to each other. The reason is immaterial. The talk is everything. This may, indeed, be our very own winter of discontent.