Morning Thoughts: Ships

C.W. and I were talking …

He kept asking me what the hell had gone wrong. I said I didn't know, so he went outside to play with the dogs. He likes dogs. He says the Fallooninians hold them in higher esteem than they do homo sapiens. After he left, I started thinking and made some notes.

In my adult life, I’ve viewed my country, in the sense of a collective entity, as a nation with flaws, and capable of making poor decisions, but one also capable of making sublime ones: the elimination of slavery, the civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan, the de-fanging of Joe McCarthy, the efforts to remove glass ceilings for minorities and women, the efforts to afford human rights and respect to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and the care of “the least of those among us."

I’m old enough to remember the first time I saw an African-American brother allowed to sit in a movie theater or restaurant in the American South, and the first time I worked with female chief executive. I remember the first time one of my gay brothers-in-life felt safe in proclaiming to the world the sexuality that nature provided him.  (I wonder if anyone else is confused by the tendency of right-wing evangelicals to assign their own actions, particularly their shortcomings, to “God’s will” but insist on referring to the sexual physiology of others to “choosing sin).

Anyway, we’ve not fully achieved what should be moral imperatives in our country’s governance, but I do believe we try. Although the path gets blocked at times, we seem to bumble through. Our country has often benefited from wise and enlightened leaders. 

Now, I see a country increasingly run by a minority of mean-spirited, cruel, anti-knowledge creatures elected not on capabilities but on artificially created hatred of their perceived enemies . As the old salts used to say when the top-heavy ship on which I served rolled in a storm, “It will right itself.” Here is a story I wrote using my old Navy ship, the USS Hunley, AS-31 as a metaphor. The old girl always enjoyed a steady hand.

I hope my country shall, for I do love it so.

She was top-heavy and could roll in a storm.
She always righted herself. I hope we do.