Saturday, February 19, 2011

Write about... A Dessert That Betrayed Me

I burst from the classroom. The news had been delivered. As I wobbled down the sidewalk, my thoughts tumbled in directions that bumped into each other; crisscrossing, tangling and tying up. The clear and luminous sky of that Indian summer day was spent on someone else... its beauty went unsung, unnoticed by me. I made scrambling efforts to think clearly and to wrap my mind around this thing... this violation... this rape... of the American spirit.
In ninth grade civics class less than a decade before, I watched in numb bewilderment as John F. Kennedy slumped into his wife’s arms, his life spilling from his body. The people... cried.
Four years later when I graduated, I was filled with hope and promise anew... only to come face to face with the turmoil of Viet Nam. This was a slinking and slithering war, slimy in all it came to be. It was war without “honor”. It dragged on and on. The people... cried out.
A recklessness like that of a child gone wild in learning that her father is a liar soon exploded in the rebellion that was Woodstock. The people... cried no more; they blew their minds in clouds of smoke and swallowed their fears on sugar cubes. The Pentagon Papers fluttered to the ground.
The atrocities of corruption were indeed on the rise but it seemed that always it had been the people against the authority. Be it right or wrong, informed or ignorant, godly or demonic... it had been America standing up... rising up! Appalled by assassination, weary of war and disheartened by dishonesty, we could still look to our leadership to understand our nightmares and try to recapture our dreams.
But now, on this campus on this day, the flood came crashing down. Watergate had been opened and it drowned the American dream. My President had suddenly become a doer of dirty deeds... deep in the darkness. Kicking and screaming at the assault, the molesting of a people, I wished on him his ‘just desserts’.
Ah, the innocence of youth; the hope that gushed forth in the absence of knowledge, in the bliss of ignorance, so many years ago. All runs counter to the specter of today's pending doom.
And in this day when a leader turns away from his people, when the government denies its country's worth instead of defends it, controls instead of corrects, infects instead of instills; that day surely is... the rape of a nation.
Just desserts, indeed, and desserts that betray us. For here, in the wake of dragging our battered spirits through today’s thickening mire, the violation that was Watergate has all the gentleness of ... a first kiss.

1 comment:

Ed of Chesapeake said...

How well I remember those days of Watergate. Yes, they tore away the veil of innocence from many of us but they also gave us (at least SOME of us) the ability to discern when someone was doing something only for their benefit and not the benefit of the country. Sadly, not enough people seem to care enough to think things through.