By enemies, friends, wedding and funeral attendees? Anniversary hails, treatment of societal bookends: minors and elderly, or society’s foundations: Middle Class families, North Carolina college students, immigrants? Promises kept, Rutgers coaching, movie critiques – all define life and character.
History and movies prove the absence of perfect solutions, lives, nations and humankind. 148 years ago assassination rewarded preserving the Union and emancipating slaves. Social Security, seventy-eight years ago, the resisted New Deal, and just a moment ago, the shot that ended the thirty-ninth year of a Baptist minister, forty-five years ago.
While, in Memphis, a King’s life seemed to plunge off a motel balcony with John and Bobby before him, Civil Rights spread its wings and soared to the White House forty years later, where in 2013 it resonated in an Oval Office meeting with “Kid President.”
Four years ago in the Czech Republic, a grown up internationalist visionary, offered to collect and discard the world’s nuclear leftovers, but like the preemptive unnecessary war of his predecessor, we hardly noticed – so different from the pride in “We choose to go to the Moon.”
Perhaps now, as the nuclear waste cleanup nears its end of 2013 deadline, we need a judgment call on our media “best-looking attorney general” focus, while lacking attention to presidential amendment of April 5, 2009 pledge.
With supremely bad judgment of Kim Jong-un missiles going mobile and Scalia’s “…I’m curious, when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868? When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?” now downloaded to every American device, are we not now engaged in great civil wars?
Members of Supreme Court against members of society;
Members of Congress against members of a world of nations united for rational Arms Trade Treaty — except for Senate allies Syria, Iran and North Korea?
We are judged by the company we keep:
H. R. 814 against President’s “Brain Initiative” to cut Social Security, testing whether our nation, or any nation conceived out of revolutionary war and so dedicated to independence dependent on bearing arms, can long endure the blinding glare of distracting LaPierre, while the great battlefield of our civil wars is that final resting place for freedom: the NRA packed backrooms of the U. S. Congress – where minds closed to massacre control, plot behind closed doors for more profitable super-sized magazines.
Government of, by and for the people can be no more perfect than the imperfect people for which we vote. Still, despite Right efforts to limit elections to a limited ‘justice for all’ point of view, when “We the People” recognize the glow of our votes as the pot of gold arc foundation of our national rainbow, no Right-minded mission can accomplish the undoing of ‘we are the world,’ nor diminish ‘we are the change’ we’ve been looking for, since that spiritually uniting July 2004 convention speech.
Then, recognizing our imperfections, like the Denouement in 2012 movie “People Like Us,” we can embrace each other in loving union, to free our elder years of Alzheimer’s, to cure government of the cancer of money laundering and to end the discrimination of corporate war profiteering inducing waves of bloody assault weapons amnesia: 1999 Columbine, Virginia Tech 2007, 2011 Tucson parking lot, Aurora 2012 Movie date and Sandy Hook Christmas: 20 students, 6 teachers.
That’s my thumbs up to Roger Ebert re-joining Gene Siskel on the isle, knowing life, unlike movies, is far from perfect, but I tip my hat to those who know in America, it could be.
Please share with your friends. Thank you!