Waiting Only to Break Free

By: Lisa Kadonaga

This morning, I walked down the driveway and stared at the American shoreline, off in the distance. Once upon a time the snow on the mountains looked ethereal and alluring, like vast peaks of vanilla ice cream. Now it just looks like... frozen water.

In some ways, two years is a very long time indeed. You can get married, have a baby, change your life within a couple of dozen months. And yet, it seems to have passed like the blink of an eye - the transition from happiness to despair, optimism to fear. Prosperity and generosity to... what? The Project for a New American Century?

There was a time when diplomacy meant something. Not wheedling and bribing and threatening, or bestowing cute nicknames and laughing at people behind their backs. Compromise was something you strove for - it wasn't derided as being "irrelevant". Just as a legal system was something dignified and praiseworthy, not the last resort of people were too weak and cowardly to do anything other than "file a lawsuit".

And yet, the ones who jeer so disrespectfully are the very same people who rushed off to file their own lawsuit - to prevent all the votes from being counted - back in the last months of 2000.

The American people were right. They chose a leader, a competent and thoughtful man, even a visionary of sorts, whom they believed would be the best choice to guide their nation into a new century. But the court forced someone else on them, and day by day, choice by choice, the individual who quite literally "took office" in January 2001, is leading his country into a disasterous Middle East conflict.

It wasn't a perfect country. God knows, there are no perfect countries. But how much better to have an Old America, which stumbled and made mistakes and apologized, and tried to work with other countries to make the world a safer wiser place. New America has all the swagger with none of the humility, even though "humble" is a word that's constantly on the lips of George Walker Bush and his associates. In fact, he's been nothing of the sort. And that little betrayal - the discovery that the real Bush is nothing like the friendly, affable, earnest image of the campaigns - is all but lost, in the much larger and deadlier betrayal of his constituents, that's unfolded since he put his hand on the Bible that Inauguration Day.

With the shredding of civil liberties, social programs, environmental protection - the United States is barely recognizable now. On an individual level, there's the hideous spectacle of Americans fretting over what their neighbors will think if they haven't got a flag - or one that's big enough, or displayed in a prominent enough location.

There always had been people in the country who were shallow, or greedy, or pushy - the stereotypical "ugly Americans", tolerated abroad because all of us non-US citizens recognized that these traits are found in every nation - and because we could think of dozens of American friends, relatives, and colleagues who disproved that stereotype. But to think of those coarse caricatures being allowed to dominate the society, even shaping foreign policy - it seemed impossible before.

No longer. One woman I know recalled an airplane flight a few months ago, where a quartet of drunken men bullied a fellow passenger, even following him off the plane and threatening him with bodily harm. More than a hundred other people watched this spectacle, cringing with shame, but not daring to say a word because the men were New York cops. Torn by guilt and indecision, some of the onlookers wept.

Wrapped in bulletproof Kevlar and the flag - and in duct tape and plastic sheeting too - they are weeping still. "They looked more terrible than they felt", wrote T.H. White, referring to the warriors of Mordred in their fearsome armor. May it be so - may there still be living hearts within, waiting only to break free.