New Reality...

Science Fiction creates imagined realities. Whole new worlds, based on the author's visions, fears and aspirations. But, what reality do we perceive in the real world?

As our nation celebrates another birthday, one cannot help but feel a strange new reality dawn. A reality of pandemic and race conflict. Of a nation fighting to find its elusive and evolving soul on this, the anniversary of its birth.

Multitudes march through the streets demanding justice, in the wake of still more police killings. The best and the worst of us emerge in tides of anger. In fire and looting. In peaceful protest. In embrace. In hope. In the toppling of monuments. In the changing of names and symbols. We confront our past. We confront our past romanticizing of it. We seek to find ourselves. To heal wounds. To find the path that brought us here, and a new path forward.

With Liberty and Justice for All.
For All.

Those are the words we seek to earn the right to call our national creed. Some of us do.

Not the man who currently calls himself our leader.

He's not about healing or unification or truth. His power grows from the antithesis of these. Anger. Fear. Hate. Self aggrandizement. Truth twisted into any form that suits the deification of self. Of nation. And, above all, of him.

As reality shifts into places we've seldom been. As life seems more a science fictional dream of masks and distancing. As scientists issue grave warnings amid mounting death tolls...

Our rabble-rousing megalomaniacal leader dismisses it all as mere fantasy and exaggeration. Life is wonderful, he tells us. It is everything we wish it to be, because he presides over it. He takes credit for victories which have not happened. He ignores deaths which occur daily. He utters not a word of injustice or police brutality or killing, because these things do not exist in his flawless kingdom.

He acknowledges those who cry out for justice only as evildoers who would dare deface our mighty monuments. Who would dare see our nation as anything short of the kingdom of heaven. His is the imagined reality. Some follow it, while others seek a higher reality of justice. One not yet born, except perhaps in the minds of science fiction writers who envision utopia.

A reality that never was...a childish melodrama of heroism and blazing glory...contends with an aspiration for a better world; a world in which we are all equal in justice, and in which ideals of freedom and truth are living things that grow into a brighter future; not relics of a half-imagined past to be blindly worshiped, but never understood.

Happy Birthday, America. On this birthday, you are offered challenges of hardship to test your mettle. And, you are offered a choice of realities. Truth, it has been said, is clothed in thorns and hardness. Lies in soft, comforting offerings.

Choose, America. The future is watching.