I haven’t really loved the United States for a long time I feel like. “The Thrill is Gone” is well like it. I was revived in my feelings about the US when Carter was elected. I made the movie documentary “The Common Fool’s Trip to the Inauguration”. Of movies I’ve made it is the one I have rewatched the most, and I recently sent it to the DNC youtube television channel hoping they would put it in the lineup.
You can find it in the 160 video clips, videos and movies put on Transcendian, my youtube channel.
In the US, in my travels that continued in my life up until I was 49, and I moved to Chapel Hill, Carrboro, got married, and have hardly been out of town since there were extreme ups and downs. The years immediately after my business failed in NYC were miserable. By the time I was resettled to NC after a year in Florida, after 6 months in Rochester again, I first accounted a year that showed 6,000 dollars.
That year in Florida was a whopper. I got sick and I got arrested and was egged on the road while riding a bicycle. Sure there is no income tax, but it costs 425 to register your car. It did. It was a surprise. I finally just sold the truck and it was only the motorcycle which blew the engine right on time. The engines were known to go at 12,000 miles for those old 450 Hondas.
I got arrested for doing what was legal for a cop on a motorcycle, but not for me as a “civilian”. By then and when done I was for the registering and all regs and laws that would apply to ground transport motor vehicles to be made a national system as is the FAA system that governs aircraft.
How can the poor find any great reasons to love the US? Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are something to inspire a bit of loyalty. You have a record. You had better make a good wage though, or you won’t get so much. There was evidence I was worth something for becoming skilled enough that the Union wanted me. I could afford the NYC card, but got a card in NC as a charter member of the Local 491. There was no way to survive for someone like me other than as a union member.
It is an International. The Locals compete. Any Right Wing ideologue ought like that, though they talk a lot about loving the nation. It might be a surprise that in the International NC lost first most to Canadians.
Transcendia has failed as I have been forced to get old and run out of time and there was no money getting better in it. The aviation industry wages for the job I loved doing on airports forced me off as well as the institution of piss testing after traces of pot in your fatty tissues. I moved to jobs where I wasn’t subject to coerced evidence of the use of pot.
Hiding out in the nation that was what the US had become was more like it. How can you love a nation that is at war after you set up to take your freedom when you are out dodging the police for all the little crimes of poverty or non conformity as Hoover’s murderous FBI was, and was a legacy system set in stone that the Feds kept going poisoning users, and now at a fatality rate yearly on the borders of 10 to 14 thousand a year?
“Love It Or Leave It.”
What do they call my generation? What were the dreams of Woodstock Nation? They were to just get away from it all. The dream of my generation was to go out in the country and live off grid and just stay out of the way of the rest of the nation.
There was no way for the rational man and woman of my generation to love much beyond whatever was in sight.
I decided to really get involved in politics, beyond the writing. I have decided to announce an intention to run for US Senate. My job in the world is to prevent Apocalyptic Riot. I can work at making the US a nation to be worthy of love by its citizens again from a US Senate seat.
First I have to find reasons to love it, my nation, as it is, now. You tell me what it is that makes you love the US?
I lived in Canada where there is more media censorship along with self censorship, which matters when you are writing for a TV program. So Canada as great as it is, this small little nation if you count people does not inspire love in me because of that free speech being less than in the US.
The biggest reason for me to love the US, as it is, is the strong tradition of free speech. I can work from that to revive that love lost.