JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

Dear America,

I miss you. You are the land of my birth, the place I spent my formative years, and I have many fond memories of you. Even though I now live across an ocean, in a very different sort of place, I long for you, America. I long for what I have left behind.

For me, nurtured in your mountains and on your plains, you were a land of never-ending highways, of hidden mountain valleys, of desert vistas so wide and awesome as to take my breath away. You were a place of close-knit neighborhoods and stalwart rural towns, of all-night diners and riding bicycles in the streets.

I knew a place where black folks would defend the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march and assemble, secure in their belief that in a great democracy of ideas, truth and right could win the day without censorship and repression, even of the those who hated them. A place where white folks would stand shoulder to shoulder with those same black folks, to bear witness that the majority was united against hate and intolerance.

I have traveled across much of your land, America, and you have shown me many things. You have shown me neighborhoods full of people of every color and creed, every race and religion, living together and working together, praying together and eating together, talking together and, yes, arguing together, but together nonetheless.

When the hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts and floods come and destroy, you have shown me people with barely enough to get by sharing everything they have with those with even less. When terror came from the sky and struck the heart of your greatest city, you showed me workaday civil servants running into collapsing buildings, certain in the face of death, hoping to save just one more person.

You have shown me a beautiful stirred up mix of humanity, united by the common thread of the shared American dream of enough for everyone. Even when down and out, your people believe, deep inside, that their lot will improve, that they can get back on their feet and make things better for their children.

But you have increasingly become a place I do not recognize. More worryingly, you have become a place I am not sure I care to know.

You have taken down the torch of Liberty and put up a wall in its place. You put your citizens on watch lists and demand that other countries spy on their own citizens in your stead. You lock them up in foreign countries to have them tortured on your behalf.

You no longer extend your hand, your home, your heart, to your neighbors; you abandon them to scream and drown in their own homes. And having abandoned them, you call them rioters and looters while you fret about the cost of damages to your industrial plants.

You have become a place where I cannot afford to take care of myself; a place where going to the doctor for a routine check-up costs me more than I make in a day, on top of the insurance premiums I pay in order to keep my costs so “low”.

You have become a place where the only freedom that matters to anyone is the freedom of contract. A place where small businessmen champion the “right” of large businesses to cut deals behind your back and defraud you of your pension investments, to unfairly muscle those very small businessmen out of the market.

Sadly, you are no longer my America. Perhaps you never were.