For true, I can remember America.
There’s those who cannot, and they may be better off for it.
It was never a real thing, any more than money was real, or God, or anything you cannot touch or handle or use. In the end, America likely did more harm than good and was no more use against folk’s anger than words or pledges or love.
In the end, anger is all that counted.
I’m the oldest one I know around here. That may give me away if you know the place. I went to a real school and studied in real books. I had teachers. Dozens of them over the years. They told us the maths and the spellings and also histories, and that’s where they let us down, I suppose.
It’s not easy to reconcile now, in my old age. What they meant us to learn, against what they said to us.
Here’s how I remember it: you had the whole world, all that had ever happened to people and more, and into all of that America happened. America, they’d tell you, was special. It was special for more than you just happened to be born there. It was special for more than being rich and strong. It was special because of principles, which are beliefs. They are a nation’s truth, I suppose. And America's were the best out of all the other. The best truths.
I can see now why they did it that way. They needed us to believe it. America, as I said, wasn’t a real thing. It was an idea, something you could talk about but never actually touch or see. And if we believed in it, it worked, in a way. It worked for someone. Never for us.
We had more than we have now, but not all that we could have. Does that make sense? It doesn’t matter. What matters is what we were doing without. That was what was important, and it was different for so all. We all hated America but all for different things. It had turned on us, and being an idea, there was no end to the turns it could make, the faces it could pull down and leer at us with. Whatever America was doing for us, and looking at what we have now, that was never as important as what it was not doing. That was different for many, but you were never in doubt; folks would use their media and their mouths to tell you what it wasn’t doing. I can remember most; it was all anyone ever heard when I was a child.
Maybe America didn’t let you move here from somewhere else; maybe it let too many people move here.
Maybe America wouldn’t pay your doctor, maybe it made you pay for someone else’s doctor.
Maybe it told you where the oil pipes were going to maybe it let someone else tell you no, the oil pipes can’t go there.
Maybe a woman was in charge instead of a man, maybe a rich man instead of a leader, maybe a foolish man instead of a wise one.
Maybe the rich people kept their riches for themselves. Maybe America let people take your riches.
Maybe the police killed too many good people, maybe they let too many bad ones go. Maybe no one cared like they should like you did, about what you cared about.
Whatever it was, whatever America wasn’t doing what you absolutely needed it to do, that was where the lie ended for you. That was where you woke up and realized that an America that did not meet your expectations was one that you had no allegiance to. That was when the nation took sick and began to die, because an idea cannot live outside of the human heart, the human mind. It cannot defend itself but must be defended. It must be fought for, not fought over.
When I was young, they were taking down the confederates. The confederates were people who, long ago, decided America didn’t work for them anymore and they tried to break it. I was told they were bad people, but some disagreed with that because in the lower states there were statues all about of them. One was Lee, one was Jackson. Those men tried to break America and President Lincoln stepped on them for it. I was told they had it coming, and I guess from what I know of them I believe that to be true.
Statues are a kind of idol, a thing that stands for an idea. I can’t say if those idols should have stood for a day or forever. I have no love for the ones who put the statues up and I can’t say for the ones who put them down. The only reason I think of them at all, is I can say I know what the fellows the statues were of felt like. All of us could say when the idea of America died for us, and there was no us anymore, no we.
Our Confederate Moment.
Our ‘I’ll burn it down’ moment.
We thought ourselves Lincoln, the one who would hold America together, but I can see now that we weren’t. We were all Jacksons and Lees, drawing a hundred million lines in the dirst.
This far, we said.
No further.
'I’ll burn it all down', we told one another 'Before I let you make America into a thing I cannot recognize.'
And so we did.
Do I regret?
Divided against ourselves, we did not stand. And was what stood ever great to begin with? They taught us histories in school, but it was outside of school that I learned how America
came to be. We lived--and many of us lived well--on a pile of skulls to which we added more every day. Bad water, bad air, the wicked prospered, the good were ground under. Why save such a thing? Why let such an engine run? Could it ever serve as a good thing?
I know in school they taught us histories that fed the lie. They wanted us to keep the engine turning. They said there were means to change the engine, but we quickly understood that those means were no more than tools of the mighty, and ever out of our grasp.
When I came of age, my vision of America was of a all-consuming, mother-killing, coal- hearted, giant that sought to use up the world, a machine half of us would kill or die to keep churning away.
And so we did.
There are no schools anymore. Not much America is left. There is no us, no we.
Lies remain. Injustice remains.
There is no clean slate, it seems.
We scrub and scrape and the foulness remains. The hole keeps getting deeper.
That is my truth.
You may never hear it because I’m taking the batteries out of the machine that is recording these words and leaving it powerless here in the emptiness.
Like the truth, these four d cells are not ours, only mine.
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