November 8—we will have a stress test

America faces a stress test in November:

can we handle the effort needed to keep the republic viable?

we’ll have a binary choice for President,

often for Governor, often for Senator,

like an aging body,

the body politic is beset by stress:

jobs disappearing,

jobs morphing beyond what seems to be in our control,

terrorism infesting the world we know,

war calling, though most of us can not realize it’s personal,

the culture changes—the racial, the ethnic, that which is gender,

the familiar loses to the new, to the different,

the comfortable couch of our sameness

replaced by the aerobic challenge of keeping up with the different,

the “one” questioning whether the “many” can sustain the whole,

while we should be agreeing on the problems

and then listening, then considering each other’s alternatives, 

Washington and the states deny the real problems are real,

and obsess about the trivial,

the real problems obvious even to the young:

global climate change,

dire environmental and disease challenges,

population exploding past resources,

infrastructure decaying, and the decaying being ignored,

the future good sacrificed to present greed,

instead, due to the Supreme Court imagining

that money is speech, that corporations are people,

that money given to politics can be untraceable, 

our airwaves are filled with the best manipulation money can buy:

distortions and lies to push us into fear

so that those who have more can have even more,

like Jefferson, I believe 

in the inherent goodness and wisdom of the common person,

in November we will see if optimism is right,

if we can pass the stress test

and assert the best of what’s in us, not the worst.

by Henry H. Walker

August 27, ‘16