Through Red, White, and Blue Colored Glasses

I.

It’s 2001, and your mother holds you to her hip as she watches the television, smoke blanketing Manhattan

You’re 19 months old when two planes hit the Twin Towers, and while you were born in a pre-9/11 world, you will die in a post-9/11 life

A life of useless TSA checkpoints, of primetime television shows depicting Muslims as terrorists, and of sending uncles overseas to fight in the War on Terror

(How do you even fight an idea?)

This war doesn’t do much --- except for decimating a country and leaving soldiers with wounds, both seen and unseen

(What’s the for-profit American healthcare system supposed to do anyway, treat these injured soldiers?)

The only time you hear your uncle talk about Iraq is when he speaks of artillery and MREs

II.

It’s 2008 and you’re in the second grade

With your hand over your heart, you pledge allegiance to the United States of America every morning

At 8 years old, you don’t understand why your father is stressed about work, as you’re too young to comprehend phrases like “the great recession” and “the housing bubble burst” and “predatory lenders targeted low-income homebuyers” and “the government will bail out banks but not its own people”

You don’t understand the economy, so you turn your attention to something else: the election

People ask how you would vote, and you parrot back what your parents tell you, unaware of what you truly mean

III.

It’s 2016 and you happily wave that red hat, thinking something revolutionary is going to happen, and it does --- slashing healthcare coverage, building a wall, creating trade wars, alienating our allies, and befriending our enemies -- it is revolutionary indeed

Fear, uneasiness, separation, and division plague our country

Black women and men are so often murdered by the state, that a new hashtag goes viral every week

(Or, wait, was that a hashtag for another mass shooting?)

And speaking of plagues, you’re a college freshman when the coronavirus pandemic hits

It feels like you’re about to witness the end of civilization as you know it as the racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the other -isms and -phobias of society rear its head like a Hydra

You’re tired of living through a once-in-a-lifetime event every two years

IV.

It’s 2023 as you toss your college graduation cap in the air, ready to take on your next adventure

But you’re already tired and angry and feeling defeated as you look at the wreckage of your country

You grew up with tales of a mythical America, of a great America that had morals and ethics, but as you walk across the graduation stage you realize that you had been taught to look at your country through red, white, and blue colored glasses

Now, you and your fellow peers want to take off those glasses and look at the deeply traumatic history of your country dead in the eye

You want to fix its flaws, because isn’t that what a good citizen is supposed to do?

Yet left, right, and center, people try to hinder you from fixing anything; some even refuse to acknowledge there is anything wrong in the first place

But you and your peers persevere, digging through the wreckage, looking for the slightest glimmer of hope

You sweat and you bleed and you cry, and when you finally find that shred of hope, you hold tight and you don’t let go

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Penned 2023.07.01.

Performed 2023.07.02 at Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church, The Woodlands, TX.