"I feel"

This is as much of an advance on my emotional state right now that I can give. I feel. I feel. I feel. Not good. No, that is not say I feel okay, could be better, but really, I'm unsettled.

Yes, unsettled. Tonight, like seldom time before, I have been exposed to the shame that accompanies being an American. Common to these past encounters, I have been shown the bleak side, the side swept beneath the hall rug, of American life. I feel ashamed to claim this country, these people, in this instance, as something that is mine. And I think back to every country song commemorating America for all the freedom. Freedom yes, of course. Freedom, the rancid fallacy that managed somehow to sneak past everybodys' noses. That inhibits most, and is claimed by all. America the land of the free, America, my country. Because nobody feels, they just make choices.

It's the pointed debates held, that place America up against to so many poor, suffering, horrid, violent, etc. countries, just to make the States marketable to a group of people who have never really been asked to think for themselves, that make me care. Do we really stop to think poor thoughts upon ourselves? Don' answer yes, don't you dare answer yes, because we don't. I'm admitting I don't and it disgusts me. I couldn't stare this country's problems straight in the face if I were dead and in the grave.  But it doesn't make them less real, less apparent to every soul out there who's living it, who knows because that's every day in their world.

We sit in front of television sets watching CNN, MSNBS, and we think we get it. We think that yes, yes, this is our time, our turn to think for ourselves. Stand up on our own two feet and show the world we know what the fuck we're talking about. Right. And have our kool-aide too. It is a thought beyond hope and depression that I, along with faces I'll never see, will never know, I mean really know, that they ever made a choice of their own volition. I'll never know that it was me, and not some book I read that helped me, or some musician that inspired me, or some class that tested me, a man or a woman who put an idea in my head. Refute me, get in my face, and look me dead in the eye and tell me I'm wrong. Stay out of the dark all you want, but I'm there, awake, and it's the only time I can say that I enjoy being alone, so go ahead, don't believe. That is, at the heart of the root, what it is to be a human being in this tamed and cultivated land. You can't always believe what you're told. This is America.