Time to vote and that is what I do. It is my right. It is my duty. You have the same right and the same duty. I respect that. I used to love to stand in line and wait my turn at the polls. I would visit with people in my precinct that I had not seen since the last time I voted. Course that is all changed.
Now, I get my ballot in the mail and fill it out at my kitchen table. I then put a stamp on it and walk it back down to the mail box. Or throw it on the dash board of the car and drop it in the ballot box behind the "used to be bank" building on 8th and Main. Never had to worry about poll hours or anything that way.
Now we have a faction in this country that wants to change the voting laws and the way the electorate works. There has got to be a way to keep the poor, the minorities, the "less equal then us" from being able to cast their ballot without it becoming a hardship! No mail in ballots, no early voting
I also used to watch the news faithfully to see what was going on in the world. Occasionally there was something on there that made me feel good, like the time that the rescuers saved those boy scouts who were lost in a cave some where overseas. A place I never heard of, I think. Those days are gone.
Now it is politics. "Them versus us". It seems that my world pretty much went to hell 3 or 4 years ago. Respect for government has pretty well gone out the window. Did it start when the world watched on live feed as a white policeman knelt on a black man's neck until he died? Did it culminate when a band of thugs breached security at the nations capitol and destroyed a piece of history? And then when we were most vulnerable I watched the television screen show a little red "x" leave Wuhan, China, travel across an ocean to Seattle, Washington and then cut catacorner down to Florida to begin spreading something called the "Corona Virus" in our country.
It was then that we scrambled to find a vaccination to contain it and our mortality rate began to sky rocket. It was then that a faction of America rebelled and refused to wear a mask or be vaccinated because "they" had "rights" that I do not have. Death rates began to spiral from a pandemic that parts of our society dub a "government conspiracy" to circumvent their rights. What the hell?
Where is my America? You know, the one where we cared about each other? Where are the lines for immunization where we all lined up to fight mumps, red measles, polio, diphtheria.....? We quit flying the Confederate flag for a reason. We used to be considerate of other people. We used to say "excuse me" and "sorry". A tear running down someones cheek used to invoke sympathy.
Where in the hell did MY America go? Where is the compassion and common sense? Maybe I am just a dreamer to think that this country can survive if we all pull together.
It just ain't happening, is it?
