The View from Craggy Heights

From high above, on the stony heights, looking down to the Trump-loving farm valleys below, you'd never know that this is a nation fueled by greed and fear.  From up here it looks like a place that makes sense, a pretty place of fields and meadows, a green place worth living and dying for.  From up here it looks like the kind of place where decent people live, people who send their mothers cards for Mother's Day, and help a neighbor in need, and share what they have with the ones who have little.  From up here, looking down, you'd swear this was an orderly place, well-managed, well-cultivated, well-loved, the kind of place where a black man could go jogging and not get killed by two rednecks with guns.

But the view from up here can be deceiving.  Once you quit these silvery heights and descend the rocky pinnacles to the fertile valleys below, you'll find a place far less lovely than the one you saw from a distance.  It's a nation where concerned citizens have to circulate online petitions just to get those two murderous, bloodthirsty lynchers arrested.  A simple arrest doesn't even mean that a person is deemed guilty.  It means that a person is being investigated for guilt.  Will the State of Georgia not even admit that Greg and Travis McMichael need to be held in custody and charged with the death of an innocent man, whose only crime was physical exercise--something these gun-toting illiterates wouldn't recognize?  All they saw was a black man running, and they assumed he'd been out raping and stealing.  Why have they not been taken into custody?  Why, when the murder was caught on film, have they not been charged?  

It looks so beautiful from up here, so serene, so pastoral.  That's one of the reasons I love it up here on the craggy heights.  I can look down on this place that I still love and see it as it ought to be.  But America is a deeply sick place, an empire in decay.  As much as I love my homeland, I love justice more.  Can you see the shadows gathering above these peaceful valleys?  Can you feel the eerie chill on the evening wind?  If we cannot come together to end white supremacy, this experiment in democracy will not end well for any of us.