Whether Diplomats testifying before Congress inspire pride in how far our truth has progressed, or incite worry that White Supremacy will never be normal in America, our character traits are exposed to friend and foe alike - and like caging children, injected into America’s DNA, for our children.
Why did it happen? Was it too much vain complacency after WWII success or when non-Caucasian Jonnies come marching home, again were reclassified, from, Over There, to Jim Crow fodder over here?
How did it happen? Failed 1935 plotting anti-democracy money changers reinvigorated by April 1945 stroke of luck, plotted anew: Military Industrial Complex coup or did our collective and individual strategy for character, simply, like Cheney, have other priorities?
Our American life experiences are overloading on internalized disinformation just when we need each other and color, more persuasion than coercion, more visionary compromise than cookie-cutter talking points.
Now to recapture our abandoned art of communication, our capacity to be inviting, and willingness to not merely hear, but listen intently to each other - rather than Russian hackers, Putin trolls and high placed carnival barkers hijacking our highest places in the heart.
Will a kinder universe, aid and abet the resurrection of our talent for civil debate, so essential to our nation’s survival?
Perhaps if we weren’t so completely convinced, what we know, do and live is best for, one size fits all, we wouldn’t elect to swing from extreme to extreme.
The chink in self-serving armor, however, is historical: most pre-WWII Germans were good citizens, indeed good people, who happened to be mesmerized by someone so captivatingly charismatic, their sense of being betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles, and their hero worship twisted them into inescapable accessories to massive death and destruction.
One WWII lesson is, millions of mostly young Americans died so we would never succumb to the fear fueled hate that breeds a blind desire for revenge, assuaged only by oppressively dominating others.
At the end of each day, do we really believe Putin could hack our 2016 election without being Gerrymandered assisted by American voter suppression?
Where do we go from here, losing our temper in backyard bigotry, Town-hall brawls, school murders? Do we choose the path of Jim Jordan or former National Security Council senior director, Fiona Hill? Just how best do we demonstrate patriotism?
What should the people who feel government has left them behind say to those blinded by Citizens United’s flood of Billionaire corporate money into our electoral process?
Are the Liberal Media and Conservative Republicans correct in accessing that most Americans don’t know the meaning, and by extension, the impeachable significance of Quid Pro Quo?
How do we teach successful Wall Street Barons the value of respecting their client/customers? Perhaps by encouraging our entire world view to personally redefine success; but first realize, whether president, teacher, Religious or skeptic, the company we attract and how we treat the less fortunate are better measures of accomplishment, than bank balances and myopic politics.
Why are we so afraid of intelligent women? When will we accept that as long as sex is between consenting adults who are not married to you, then their sex is not your climatic business?
Whether Putin’s agenda of divide and conquer Americans or impeachment witnesses switching out conspiracy theories with the truth about our 45th - whether unknowing stooge or calculating desperado – individual character determines our ability to communicate, rather than alienate.
All of us know, no one is a perfect specimen of perfect thoughts, feelings and actions, so why then do we continue to only do things our way - some even favoring absolute denial over compromising for solutions to, gun violence, tribal nationalism masquerading as patriotism and running scared of Climate truth.
Greatness, whether State or individual, requires dissonance as well as harmony, for it is through Citizen Journalism that makes John Bolton woman-up, protects females from harassment, exposes anti-American hypocrites and enlightens America’s rediscovering, the ties that bind us together, in remembrance and thanksgiving.