Our 250th Birthday is shaping up to be just some lonely guy at the end of a table attempting to unfurl a noisemaker after a night of heavy drinking.
What will we be celebrating, as a nation? Sure, there will still be the local festivities with parades and fireworks and cookouts. But as a nation, what will we be the condition of our psyche? Will we feel like a party is in order? Will it be all red, white, and blue and weak-in-the-knees patriotism? Will we feel any sense of pride or optimism? Or will it look more like confusion, like the contrived excitement of that gathering of young people in Beijing who stopped whooping and hollering, as if on cue, as soon as Trump and Xi had passed by?
Personally speaking, I already know how it will go for me. It will be underwhelming, a lament, a regretful recognition that the dark cloud of incompetence and ugly intentions still hovers. Because the one who sits in the Oval Office is trying to tear this country apart, not make it great again. “Great” is a relative term.
He levels the East Wing, unilaterally. He orders a UFC monstrosity on the South Lawn of the White House. He orders his name or ugly mug on everything that doesn’t move, including a commemorative $250 bill. He generates daily “fuck yous” to us and we watch as he deteriorates before our eyes—in all the ways a moron can deteriorate.
This nation is only 250 years old. In some ways, it has blossomed in that time. But in other ways, we’re still young and immature, behaving like an angry, needy teenager.
And it doesn’t help to have an angry, needy teenager at the helm.
3 Cents' 