“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Abraham Lincoln

With the election year bearing down on us the fingers are already pointing and wagging back and forth across the polar aisle, faster, more furiously, and ever more bitterly. The right is blaming the left for all the nation's ills while the left is blaming the right. And that image right there provides the clearest, most brutal evidence of what is really endangering our country.

Those of us of a certain age remember the reality of the Berlin Wall. There was a wall on the west side and a wall on the east side, with a no man's land between the two that may as well have been hundreds of miles wide rather than yards. Generations came and went while an entire country remained separated by a deadly symbol of polar ideology. From time to time brave souls would dare to risk their lives to cross that line. Too many failed and died in their attempts.

That's the way I envision our political climate as it is now. We have that vast congressional no man's land that precious few are willing to try to cross. Those that do all too often see their political lives perish in figuratively the same way those brave enough to try escaping oppressive east Germany to freedom in the west lost theirs. When did it become a greater sin to cooperate than to segregate?

It's gone beyond our democracy being simply endangered, folks. We are quite literally teetering on disaster but I'm very much afraid that we're all too busy bitching at one another to notice that the bridge our constitution was meant to be is growing weaker and weaker, and that if it were made of wood boards, those boards are separating beneath our feet. Soon they will give away completely and all that America has stood for, all that Americans have fought and died for, will then become just a footnote in someone else's history book.

I wonder who they will blame?

c. 2024