Tears for Our Country on July 4
©B. A. Luceigh  (an American)
July 4, 2017

Today we are to celebrate our country’s Declaration of Independence,
yet I weep for my country instead.
The tears slowly running down my cheeks are only a faint mist
compared to the waterfall gushing out my heart,
a waterfall flowing with sadness and questions.

Why would anyone want to destroy our democracy from within?
Have “we the people” brought this madness upon ourselves as we slept?
Has our own greed for possessions taken ownership of all of us?
Have we been deafened by the oversimplification of sound bytes and tweets?
Have we refused to educate how to reason with verified facts and logic?
Do we defend our entitled freedoms through over-indulgence
in food, drugs, rudeness, and rage?
Were enough of us fertilized by the sperm of a child’s ego
to give birth to the tyranny of a new immoral code?
Are we about to make a new amendment to our Constitution that reads:
“All above Amendments no longer apply”?

I cry that the fears cautioned by our Founding Fathers
now seem on a pathway to realization.

This must stop! This must stop!
Must we, however, first learn these difficult lessons
of the rotten fruits of our beliefs in deceptions?
Have we not been seduced in our trance
while our minds and hearts were raped?
How long before we wake up to the self-destruction in progress?

I weep for our country, stand in a puddle of tears
not knowing what to do to stop their flow,
not sure who else might weep on this day set aside for celebration.
I do what I can to include my voice of action,
but I feel like an “army of one” against the unpredictable shifting waves
of distractions, secrecy, lies, cruelty, and expressions of mental absurdity.
What weapons do I have against these intangible enemies
marching across our land and onto the screens in our homes?

Perhaps I can only neutralize them
through my personal demonstrations of values of their opposites:
focus, transparency, truth, compassion, reasoned judgment.
For every act of bullying, surely I can be kind twice over.
For every act of incivility, surely I can be polite twice over.

I weep for our country through a portal of our totality
located within a citizenship based on foundational ideals now in jeopardy.
We are a whole nation with diversities as a contribution to our strengths.
We are a whole nation who are taking a wrong turn in our evolution.
Perhaps it is a needed self-correction, both personally and nationally,
to remind us how great is our need
for humility, generosity, rationality, openheartedness, community,
and kindness.
We must use our freedom of choice now with great care.
We must choose whether to sustain our liberty, justice and equality
for generations to come,
so they might have cause to celebrate a future Fourth of July.

So I weep for our country on this day,
and every now and then a tear of hope
drops onto my hands
held in a position of prayer for us all.