Promises Broken

When I was a child, and then as a teenager, I felt that there were certain promises made from me and from society. I found these promises, sort of, to also be in Tolkien's books, The Lord of the Rings, and from those I took heart that good always overcame evil, provided the people acted appropriately and with regard to one another and did the morally right thing.

From me was the promise to society that I would be a good citizen. I would vote, marry, have children, work a job as necessary, pay my taxes, volunteer my time to my community, and do all that I could for others.

From society, the perceived promise as I grew up was, at the least, a decent life-long job, a pension, Social Security, medical care when I was older, and affordable medical care in the interim years, safety from war and others who might mean me harm, roads upon which to drive, schools in which my children would learn, and a general acknowledgement of equality for all, even though I fully understood from multiple sources that I was not the equal to a man in anything.

I upheld my promise as best I could. Indeed, the only thing I did not manage was having children, and as that was due to a health issue, it was not my fault that said promise went unkept. I have voted in every election since I came of age, I married, I worked numerous jobs, I volunteered with the ladies' auxiliary of the local volunteer fire department, with historical societies, and with the library system. I considered my news writing to be an educational endeavor always, a way of explaining to those around me how their local government functioned and what role it played - or could play - in their lives.

No one has been injured in any extreme by myself, nor have I broken laws or otherwise attempted to do anything that would discredit me or my country.

In general, I feel I kept my promises.

Society has not kept its promises. Since 1980, the general mood of cooperation among members of society had degraded to the degree that we are where we are now, with the demise of our social experiment near at hand, and mass murders every day because instead of societal cooperation and concern for the welfare of one another, as I was raised, we have this mockery of independent self-concern that has somehow replaced the concept of the general welfare as advocated in the first paragraph of the U.S. Constitution.

No longer do we have job security. Health care became more expensive with the middleman of the insurance agency, so much so that now I know people who die simply from lack of care, even though such care might be available to them right next door. Pensions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past; I doubt with great seriousness that Social Security and Medicare will be available to me when I am of the age to use them, and I fear greatly that soon the schools will fall completely out of the public realm, leaving only the wealthy to learn. The roads are full of potholes; I can remember from my youth the days when the roadsides were well-trimmed, and people took pride in their streets and the way their community looked. And as for equality, the rise of nationalism and the degree to which this has degraded into the creation of so many cups of "others" is frightening and sorrowful. I never thought I'd see the day when someone walked around Charlottesville chanting, "Jews will not replace us," or the day when lies filled the airwaves and people believed them. 

To say that we are going backwards to the times of the peasantry and the oligarchy is not out of the realm of thought. Indeed, we are actually there.

I make the mistakes of reading the comments on online posts sometimes, and I am appalled that there are many people (well, mostly white people, and generally men but occasionally a woman), who believe that their right to own a gun outweighs the right of another person to have life.

To say that this astonishes me would be similar to smashing my foot in a vise, because while I know it to be true, to see it written and proclaimed so broadly is, at best, painful. The inaction of multiple administrations and persons of power, regardless of political persuasion, I find to be a complete breach of the social promise of keeping me safe. How can anyone feel safe when every day there are more deaths by guns?

Society made promises. By that, I mean too that the government made promises. These promises are being broken, the entire foundation upon which I grew up, is being completely dismantled. To say that I find traversing this new arena to be as difficult as maneuvering through the maze that trapped Frodo and Sam in The Fellowship of the Ring would be an understatement. Unfortunately, the way out of the maze for them was through Gollum, a two-faced villain who understood how to lead and persuade.

Is this then our Mount Doom? Are we to be led out of the maze by some multi-faceted messiah, a two-faced Smeagal who would see us find our way only to betray us at the end? I fear it to be so.