At the dawn of this holiday weekend, I received another of a sporadic series of videos and memes from an elder neighbor. I don’t know this spunky woman well and I assume no ill of her intent with her shares. But they are always diametrically opposed to my own stances in the political arena. I asked her, this time, to stop sending these to me. She agreed. I left it at that.

The video showed footage of musicians, interestingly, from Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington DC, and Nashville, with the later featuring, as lead singer, Lee Greenwood, in a new release of his vintage, signature country music anthem “God Bless the USA.”

There’s many things that I could say about this song, and that others have said. I recall it well from the Reagan era of the 80s when it and our times smacked of American exceptionalism and Christian white nationalism. (And, here we are four decades later, a million times over.) But it struck me as especially insensitive at this time in our country when it blared from my phone upon opening the message Friday.

Do I love my country? Absolutely! Am I proud of her? In some aspects—for our innovation, freedom of speech….But this is a deep, dark time of reckoning and I get it not everybody is on board with that deep dive soul search. This pandemic, I’ll say it again, is a slapdown of our country to make us look at how deep our injustices—socioeconomic, racial, the justice system, political strife, and more. It’s ironic and not an accident that our coronavirus numbers are disproportionately higher than other countries, that this pandemic has been *hideously* mismanaged by federal and state Republican administrations. And then you have individuals who refuse to wear masks to prevent the spread. And here we are, out of control. God Bless America. Land of the Free.

I am not proud that we owned slaves and *still* enslave black people through pipelines to prison, radical economic injustice, barriers to social mobility and opportunity. It’s been painful and I’ve wanted to look away, but I’ve learned more in the last two weeks about the cultural eugenics of the confederacy than I ever did growing up in the South. And there’s the irony: it’s hard for me to look at it—? That there’s white privilege. I don’t have to live it. every. day. of my life.

I’m not proud of how we conduct ourselves on the world stage as a nation, especially now. How we’ve caged brown people. OMG. Have we not learned anything from our history? From world history? Oh. That’s right, we’re such a young nation, comparatively, we haven’t learned. We’ve chosen, instead, culturally, as a way of being, to ignore history. #Foolish

This is a time of reckoning. It’s like the sibling that you don’t much care for but you feel compelled to love because they are of your own flesh and blood.

Yes, there is much to love about our country, but there’s much, right now, to be deeply ashamed of and to repair. I’m holding my breath and clutching an ounce of hope that we will propel past this horrific stage of unrest and ill health with emerging leadership of more women, people of color, and young people. The later are our born light workers who know, see, and fight for the truth of equality among all people of all races, classes and cultures. But there’s no magic wand or fairy dust to be sprinkled so it can just all be over soon. The fight is real and it is predicted to worsen before we ascend.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We won’t be a nation of the free until all America’s people are free—from the enslavement of bias, fair wages and with true economic opportunities, fair housing, a truly fair justice system for all her people. No matter their color. #BlackLivesMatter

And…God bless all nations….If I had a prayer, it would be that we’d see how we have “sinned” against our neighbors of colour. That we’d “repent,” pledge and work to do better. We’ve opened up a can of worms here, you know. Black voices have led the way. Native people are behind them. Brown people. And the capitalist systems that put greed before humanity. That last one? That’s the biggie and I’m wondering what it will take for it to give way to a more just system for all Americans.

top photo: #LittleArrowImagery taken, 2017 Women’s March, Nashville