Summer’s End 2021
About ten years ago, during the hot dry summer month of August, I was seated in a waiting room for a dental appointment at a small office near my home. The receptionist was a chatty gal, always eager to converse with patients. The ambiance in that office, during the summer, was sunny, warm, and bright, filled with the energy of diversionary escapism. During the winter, however, the mood, and the atmosphere, turned cold, glum, and dark, partly because very little heat and very few lights were turned on in this workplace, partly because the employees were downhearted, despairing and depressed. During a few winters, I took to keeping my coat on during the exams.
This scenario of doom-and-gloom persisted for nearly a decade, starting in the summer of 2008. The private-business-strategy to survive the Great Recession and Obamacare was Part-Time-Employment. The two dentists, along with their hygienists, technical assistants, and clerical staff, all worked part-time. I was thankful to just to have the professional services of a dentist, and a good one at that.
On that dry, hot, sunny afternoon, this receptionist queried me as to how I felt about life, the lousy economy, the lack of jobs, the lying media, and the laundry list of absurdities, atrocities, insults, and preposterous gimmicks that had become the daily grind for the patriotic and proud in America.
I shrugged. My life was too busy for me to pay too much attention to the frauds and the treachery. I’d begun my media blackout in 2006, and it was working for me!
This woman had not engaged in a media blackout. She was furious much of the time, albeit for good reason. She intoned to me about how her dreams, and those of her husband, about their retirement, after their youngest child had left the nest — the ability to reach those dreams had vanished within the past few years.
They’d hoped to buy that Cabin at the Lake, and escape their Sierra Nevada foothill town that had become more and more populated, largely through subprime spending, and somewhat through infestation by refugees transplanted from Southern California and the Bay Area. She asked me if I found it all very hopeless and sad.
I shook my head. I was working hard to keep that head above water, but, frankly, I did not intend to “reach out” and share with an office receptionist my sentiments and thoughts on the Eternal Recession. It was known at that time among the dental staff that I’d become engrossed in writing My Novel, and that I spent my 45 minutes in the chair — napping.
I was the only patient who used a dental visit to catch up on sleep!
This woman continued to express her disgust with the goings-on in her neighborhood, in California, and in the U.S. While I could not refute the accuracy of her statements or disagree with her opinions, I also could not take my focus off of my life and my myriad responsibilities to engage in mustering up miseries, either to see who had more, or who had the worst worry and woe.
Misery wasn’t lacking any company during those miserable years!
I stated in an introspective tone:
“Maybe all of this mess is meant for us to find something else, to move on to something better. Maybe that dream of yours was meant to get you to here, and then . . . you reach toward a different dream . . .”
She silently nodded. And that was the end of that conversation.
This woman and her husband moved out of California sometime during 2014. I’d like to think that they advanced safely and happily to a more fulfilling dream, to a greater opportunity that awaited them in the Mountain West of the U.S. I hope they recovered enough from the shams and flim-flams of the past decades in America —so that they were not among the countless individuals who could not escape the cruel and gruesome effects of 2020, when the shams and flim-flams happened, once again at ramming speed, all over again.
This time around, the blood is only on the hands of the Power Mongers mutilating America. The blood is still on their hands from the previous decade of financial devastations, horrific indignities, and gross indecencies — the components that make up their gluttonous equation of America Last.
The traitors and cowards in this nation are the most recent versions of Macbeth and his Lady. I’m not too sure who plays the part of Banquo’s ghost. For a conscience to be evoked in a person, it must exist there in the first place. The ghouls of a great and growing America shall none too soon hear only one bugle call to arms, the American version of the Degüello.
The job of reclaiming America for Americans has only just begun. It’s a monumental task, one that will take longer than we patriots would like; but, as distinguishes any true act of reaching toward a glorious future, this timeline is not determined by the doers alone. The Prime Mover decides the deadline for this destiny. We are but instruments of the will of Providence.
The attainment of any dream can be a blessed realization only if it is part of a Divine master plan. All else is vanity, vaunting toward oblivion. Your goal might eventually exceed your grasp, but your effort is noble, and not for naught. An anonymous person who possessed infinite wisdom expressed that truth in this poem:
It may never be mine,
The loaf or the kiss or the kingdom,
Because of beseeching,
But I know that my hand is an arm’s length nearer the sky
For reaching.