“In God We Trust” has always been more than a Band-Aid for my thoughts when things go crazy in our country as they’re doing right now. And my belief in our country’s Constitution and its checks and balances our Founding Fathers provided therein has always buffered any fear of malicious governance. Needless to say, both my trust and faith are experiencing the shakes at present.
I have always trusted in God but at the moment I cannot help but wonder if God is trusting in us. Our country is a mess – socially, politically, religiously and philosophically. Please do not blame the coronavirus. If anything, COVID-19 is a dastardly symptom stripping us naked. God cannot be pleased with what it is exposing.
Our country seems to have its priorities upside down, spending untold amounts on endless wars and defense, muscling the military while cutting back on and undermining scientific research and universal health care, trashing and rejecting those who tell the truth. Poverty, homelessness and hunger remain rampant, education underfunded and climate change virtually ignored; the cancer that is racism, the widening economic chasm – all of that is terribly wrong.
The American Dream is morphing into a nightmare. The powers-that-be are taking care of themselves with deregulations that benefit the wealthy and cripple the rest of us. Our President has practically and shamelessly deregulated himself and his office to the point of gross dysfunction and self-serving whims. There seem to be no checks and balances for his administration agenda and even his tweets.
I want to believe that all that’s happening will eventually get us closer to where again the dream is within reach for everyone. But our brokenness and the divide in our country about problems of social justice, racism and equality cannot and will not be solved by less than all of us, if not agreeing on how to get that done, at least recognizing the problems and having a common commitment to solve them.
For our children’s sake we must live toward the future while honoring and learning from the past. The present challenges are right in our faces. We need inspired, moral leadership as well as strong and fearless voices in both the press and social media. The far left and far right must be recognized, confronted and neutralized. There should be no tolerance in this country for white supremacists, the 3%-ers and other extremists are the worst parts of the nightmare.
The obscenity in Minneapolis is a tragic wake-up call that cannot be ignored or brushed off. Like COVID-19, it has stripped us naked, from the highest levels in Washington, D.C. to every neighborhood across our land and every American worthy of the name.
The majority of us who trust in God and believe in the principles of the Constitution must work hard to restore its checks and balances. We need to rid our country of self-serving leaders and brutal authorities, and to provide equality, opportunity and well-being for all. The nightmare needs to wake us up to a new reality that allows us all to live the Dream.