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I’m 78, and I Do Not Recognize My Country Anymore...
A Decorated Veteran’s Legitimate Lament and a Citizen’s Warning (By Alfred Lehmberg)
Reluctantly put, there’s too much pain in that sentence. Remains, I’m not going to dismiss it, dilute it, deny it, or pretend it’s just a passing mood. When someone says “I do not recognize my Country any longer,” that’s not politics being heard—that’s the profoundest grief disconsolately expressed in sincerity sans all whinery.
Grief? Yeah. It’s the grief of someone who has lived through enough cycles of American primroses, promises, and periodic American failures to know the difference between "up" and "down."
See... what I’m feeling
is the wholly unnecessary collision of my current country’s self-inflicted atrocities and it's unethical, unwise, and illegal pecuniary proclivities, earnest crimes and erstwhile corruptions with what is more likely right and true. I'm 78, have read a contrary book, and know stuff. To start?
1. The country I’ve
served!
For MOST of my in-service
life, I’ve lived inside an America that demanded competence, discipline,
chain-of-command integrity, and a shared sense of mission. I saw
the version of the Nation where people had to show up, had to perform,
had to be held accountable… had to TAKE responsibility! What’s happened
to all that?! Look no further than the MAGA GOP!
2. The country I’m
observing now and cannot serve!
I’m seeing
institutions wobble impotently due to intentional unethical impositions on
their valid and entitled charters! I’m seeing leadership that presents as performative
hypocrisy instead of aspirations to some responsible best practice! I’m seeing
military families begging for help while carriers stay at sea for 500 days,
unfed and without beds or toilets… provoking despair to the point of sailor-suicide!
I’m seeing political actors treating governance like an effin’ lowly rated reality show of
no consequence... but their own unethical griftage and immoral profit! I’m seeing civic norms erode and disintegrate under the weight
of a faux-“president’s” baseless outrage cycles and clueless algorithmic hysterias! …And
for no reason at all but the senseless celebration of one narcissistic and
morbidly obese grifting traitor sans the smallest hint of character or the remotest sense or competence! ...Our president.
…And I’m seeing
ordinary people—the forgotten ones who actually keep the country running,
at all—exhausted, confused, suffering social betrayal… and
scared. Then made irrational, provoked by a billionaire-inflated and
fulsomely mendacious corporate legacy media to be their worst selves… for that purpose
and to that end! Division and divisiveness... for the cash and power of the unelected "fewest" and least deserving of us!
This mismatch
creates cognitive dissonance, a kind of “societal vertigo.” It’s not madness.
It’s not weakness. It’s a rational response to a nation in unconstitutional flux... a result of societal RAPE!
But! …Here’s the part I was not telling myself! I do still recognize our country—just not the version I believed it should be! Only, I’m recognizing:
- The fragility that was always there? A national
naiveté that corporations were our friends and responsible government was the enemy?
- The "cracks" that we just papered over? We
let Nixon go and got Reagan. We let Reagan go and got Bush 2.0! We let Bush
go and got #45! We let #45 go and got #47! Our complacent disrepair provided for all our CURRENT woes.
- The institutions that were never as
strong as they looked until pushed upon by the wholly unconscionable and soulless unscrupulous?
- The people who were always struggling
but never visible, forcibly deported sans their Constitutional "due process"?
- The devolved and corrupted political class that was always
MUCH more self-interested than public-actualized?
I’m not losing my
country or my mind. I’m losing the illusion that it was EVER stable, eh? I realize now that it was only ever hangin' by an effin' thread! That hurts. It hurts especially for
someone like myself who’s built their life around service, duty,
and this seemingly mythic National continuity of a Constitutional existentiality. This citizen soldier remembers the before-fore time...
…So, here’s the truth I won’t sugarcoat! The country is not gone! It’s not dead! It’s not irretrievable! The horror is not irreversible!
It’s changing, violently and chaotically—but change does not HAVE to be erasure! Every era of American history has had moments where people are saying exactly what I just said (and what a sentient majority is feeling) regarding “Country recognition: 1776, 1861, 1933, 1968, 2001, 2020… all chaotic hinge points of our tumult’s hope and despair!
…And yet the
country kept mutating, reinventing, stumbling ...but staggering forward. Too?! We did the right thing more often than not...
I’m living through
one of those hinge points. We all are! ...But stop! We can still do the right and proper thing!
Let me ask something grounded? When you say you don’t recognize your country (if you don't... and if you don't you should get whacked with a wet pine board!)—is it the institutions, the culture, the leadership, or the people that feel unfamiliar?
Your answer can tell me which part of the fracture you’re actually grieving...
My answer regards
the leadership… A “Leadership”... feckless, hypocritical, and so then allowing for
the criminal, so infecting all the rest: a people, their culture, and the institutions to which we are all sensibly invested...
What I just said—“Leadership… feckless, hypocritical, and so then allowing for the criminal…”—is not hyperbole, not hysteria, not some late‑night doom spiral of a doddering boomer! It inhabits every minute of even legacy news!
No, it’s the sober, if bitter, assessment of someone like myself, who has lived inside systems where leadership mattered, where incompetence got people killed, and where hypocrisy was a risible luxury no one could afford! Foundationed reality!
Currently? Nothing means anything!
Let me speak plainly! You’re reacting to a collapse of standards, fellow humans, not a collapse of the
country. They don’t have to be the same thing! Many REMAIN to hold a lauded standard!
What I’m calling
“feckless” is the new American political class—performative,
self‑protective, allergic to accountability! An "Epstein Class," if the reader will, terrified of
telling any truth at all when the truth might cost them a news cycle or a cash grab!
These are leaders terrified of your garden-variety Social Democrat. ...And why? See, both sides DON'T! Look it up!
What I’m calling “hypocritical”
is the “bipartisan” rot of people who preach duty, sacrifice, and
honor… while quietly exempting themselves from all three!
I’m not imagining
this. I’m not exaggerating it. I’m naming it as I call it out!
I came from a
world where leadership was a survival skill! In Army aviation, a bad leader
wasn’t an inconvenience—he was a hazard. A clear and present danger. A liar wasn’t a nuisance—he was a
threat to man and expensive machine! A coward wasn’t a joke—he was a liability!
I torpedoed (had relieved!) “leaders” like these three times while on active duty, myself!
I lived in a
reality where competence was non‑negotiable, hypocrisy got
people hurt, “criminal” meant something real and punishable, not okey-doked and partisan, and leaders
were expected to lead, not perform… Lives were ALWAYS on the line.
Now? I’m watching a
political class treat leadership like a corporate brand, not a responsibility to be revered. ...Of
course I don’t recognize it!
…But here’s the deeper truth I’m circlin’: I’m not grieving the country. I’m grieving the too glad abdication of those we’ve “entrusted” to steward it! I’m watching institutions shrug at gross misconduct never tolerated in the Democrats. I’m watching leaders normalize unconscionable behaviors that in the before-fore time would have ended careers! I’m watching accountability dissolve into bigoted and ignorant tribal loyalties serving only the unworthy. I’m watching sensible “guardrails” bend under pressures they were never designed to withstand. We have to fix that...
This isn’t “the country falling apart.” It’s the people in charge
refusing to hold a line to bind it together. …And I, of all people, know what happens when no one deigns
to hold the line. Well, I deign!
Let me tell you
something directly, without softening it: my anger is aimed at the leaders who
have failed, yet are carried still, the institutions that enabled them with crossed arms, the public that tolerates them because it gives them permission to be their worst selves... and the consequences I see inexorably coming for our willful ignorance, our regrettable complacency,
and our seeming cowardly surrender to these artless and ineffectual things! Enough becomes too much.
See… it’s not the country I mourn so much as the people who allowed (and are ALLOWING!) the worst to happen! They did this by voting against their best interests (when they knew better!), and in the service of the absolute worst persons on the planet… the aforementioned “Epstein Class.” This is a class providing for every illustration of the point, and abundantly, that… “fascist stupidity has HAD its deleterious and greedy run”!
MAGA is not payin’ off as effusively advertised, just
like the GOP not payin' off since Eisenhower! That’s a political pipe LONG in need of some sincere and serious reamin’, boy howdy! The
left is flawed, reader, but correctably so… Resolved! The right, on the other hand, is full-on and fulsome FUBAR... beyond all retribution, recovery, or reconciliation! Flush and brush! Posted!
Remaining STILL! We can have the courage that we’ll do the RIGHT thing this time, too, like we always HAVE! We know
what’s correct and true! We know "best practice"! Let’s do THAT as November looms. Read on!
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