PERSONS: Wednesday July 19, 2017, Walter Shaub Jr., director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, will resign. Having fought the good fight, attempting to scale the wall of lies erected by an unethical White House -- while five million families are living with Alzheimer's and too many Americans living in fear of losing their affordable healthcare.
PLACES: Saturday July 8, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia -- Exhumed from its shallow grave, a vastly outnumbered Ku Klux Klan raised its flags 72.1 miles northwest of the Confederate capital, to defend a controversial statue of General Robert E. Lee -- a West Point graduate who, in April 1861, decided to resign from the American Army and resist it as commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
Overwhelmingly, Charlottesville citizens and elected officials responded with numerous events around the city of Jefferson's University of Virginia -- defining Community with informed, educational and positive fun for all ages, including concerts, slide show talks and picnics.
In the end, however, peace between North and South was broken by police tear gas, and the arrest of locals protesting Free Speech that still celebrates the division of a nation -- with limited Rural Internet Service and congressionally endangered Medicaid.
THINGS: World Trade sailing on, royally waving farewell to floundering American ship of state, groping to survive fake running it aground, into past pale prologue -- while globe is warming to Paris Agreement to deny denial of Climate Change changing the foundation on which we stand dependent for life's essentials: Background Checks, containment of drug overdoses, substituting conservative tunnel vision with equality of quality education -- chiseling in granite: shut down school to prison pipeline.
States of Depravity and Delusion: Ignoring the potential killing of America's unique genius, for exploration, discovery and wonder, wandering the unknown, visualizing the unseen -- does not excuse choosing ignorance over reason.
It is not our raison d'etre to preserve, protect and defend Party birds of a feather flocking together for three-day work-weeks behind closed doors betraying Lincoln's vision: of, by and for the people.
Sometimes we've elected leaders, of every political persuasion, who have publicly praised and privately dialed a dictator, for purely selfish international euphoria on the grand orgasmic world stage -- but must we continue sleeping with Dicks like Nixon and Cheney, by electing one so ruthlessly willing to destabilize any plausible pretense of national morality, that might still afford our sacred institutions some remnants to claim legitimacy?
We are nouns so much more important to the universe than the gluttony for supremacy that favors the nouns of war, hate, envy, jealousy, fear, anger, greed and violence.
Neither suicide nor restoration are solo performances, but rather the ensemble consequence of failing, attention must be paid -- knowing whom to applaud and what to reaffirm. The good, bad and ugly truth is, it takes only a few to tip the scale: correct or complicit -- prophet leading those settling for pathetic, or choosing revelation over condemnation.
America's challenging conflict isn't really Red v. Blue states and less about economic, racial or sexual differences on which we've been media focused for 24/7 filler. The real 21st century American Revolution, in which we find ourselves, is the conflict between right and wrong, and knowing the difference. Hunting dirt, with foreign enemies wishing only to diminish us, is cheating on ourselves and wrong.
Collectively, we are many precious nouns, most, a cornucopia of potential gravity for the world; each, an overflowing fountain, interrupted only when overlooking both character, and characters, that determine the qualities life craves and demands of us all: civics with civility, an all-inclusive pact and replacing undermining political PACs with informed mental clarity of purpose and vision.
Living a life that honors all, is what keeps America great -- embracing, sharing and repeating, only what is true, noble, just, pure, admirable and excellent. To be praiseworthy, we need only practice what we preach.
(Article changed on July 12, 2017 at 19:09)
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