National Alzheimers?

I’m here today, away from my desk and easy chair, to visit my mother; better stated, to visit the person my mother was so many years ago. For Mom has Alzheimer’s, a crippling mental condition that takes you away from today and back into the past, a distant past; perhaps it is the Creator’s way of protecting us in our final years from the accumulated pain of life, for life can be painful.

While ruminating about this state of mind during the trip here, I wondered if perhaps our country suffers from a collective Alzheimer’s disease? Here we are, a brief decade into the 21st century, yet we hold up as a model for today the policies and practices of political leaders of the past: (post WWI isolationism vs border wars of today). The Glen Beck type popular personalities lead us in a collective, national “weeping for America;” as I will perhaps cry when I leave my Mother’s room today. Our nation’s Congress is reminiscent of children playing as if at a tea party, “If you don’t play my way, I’ll take my doll and teacup and go home.” The recent flap over the military appropriations bill comes to mind; good conservative gentlemen who would never vote against our men and women in arms lock-stepped into history as petulant children over “procedural differences.”
Only when these “children” return to adulthood will they learn to meet their life-partner halfway, to compromise and work together, so the will and plans of the collective whole becomes greater than the desires of one party to control the other.

But, isn’t that socialism, this desire to join together as one larger organism for the betterment of all? You could stretch the definition of socialism to make that statement, as the ballerina in “al seconde” stretches seemingly from one end of the stage to the next; the difference is that she then completes the move and stands tall and straight, toes to fingertips pointing heavenward. One could say marriage is socialism, for the two join together, join incomes and dreams to make a future only they can see, but a future that is as important to them as yours is to you. One could say that joining a church is socialism, for as a whole body, the churches reach out to the community around them, into the world as a whole, to make life better overall. We as a nation define these institutions as good, as promoting the American way of life; yet in definition they are very socialistic.
As members of a church may differ over the color of the Creator’s hair, or if the Creator has hair at all, they will not differ as to the goodness of the Creator. A couple may disagree for a period of time over the color of the new car, but in the end they will agree they need transportation. Our members of Congress may disagree as to the position of the period at the end of the bill; but they should agree to pay our soldiers and do the nations work.

Yes, I will weep when I leave my Mother today, for I want to remember her as the strong, willed, passionate adult person I remember; but I do not weep for America, for the Grand Lady will achieve maturity, as she is now retaking a positive place in the collective good of the world. Now is the time for our “gentlemen” in the House and Senate to return to doing the nations’ work, to making life better for all Americans, and put aside the partisan bickering of childhood.