A poster on dKos today said that she couldn’t understand the emotions she was feeling over the election until she suddenly realized that she was in mourning – in mourning for her dead country. Dramatic as that statement is, I respect and understand it. But it doesn’t express quite what I have been feeling.
I do understand her grappling with finding a way to describe her feelings. I’ve been doing that, too, trying to understand the strange mix of sadness, disorientation, and nostalgia I’ve been feeling along with the understandable anger and despair.
And, finally, late this afternoon, I got it. Living in Amarillo, Texas I haven’t experienced this feeling often, so it took me awhile: I was homesick.
Homesick. Homesick for the America I used to know and believe in.
It didn’t help that the election took place the week that we “fell back” from daylight savings time. It feels like the election of George W. Bush actually made this world a darker place.
I miss the America I sang about as a child, the purple mountain majesties, the land of the free, the home of the brave. Maybe that America was always more dream than reality; still, I miss it.
And I miss Jesus. I miss the Jesus I knew as a kid growing up in a small Midwestern generic Protestant church. But Jesus, like an old high school friend who made it big, has changed. I don’t care much for today’s Jesus—the one who hates gays and democrats and Moslems. I miss the Jesus who loved all the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white. And Arabic children. And probably even Heather-who-has-two-mommies.
I’m thinking of one of the last Jefferson Starship tunes – from the moment right before they irredeemably became Starship:
I’d like to see Jesus and Mohammed on the road to Damascus.
What do you think they would say?
Would they fight with knives clenched in their teeth,
Like Jews and Arabs today?
Or would they walk and talk
Like philosophers and thinkers. . . ?
But those lyrics are so old-school. Philosophers? Thinkers? They belonged to another age: the Enlightenment. I'm also homesick for such a time.
Because it's apparently time to write an elegy for that Age of Reason.
SPACEDARK
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