One Nation Under Fire

My love of country and my faith in humanity are going up in flames.

Can you feel it? That boiling-over-on-the-edge-of-a-precipice tension? Earth is heating up while the willfully ignorant and selfish deny climate change. US courts have lit a dangerous fuse, giving more rights to guns than to victims of gun violence, more rights to male rapists than to the women and girls they rape, and free rein for corporations to run amok and destroy our ecosystems.

Our American populace engages in heated debate over whether to actually do something about a treasonous former president and his minions intent on torching our democracy. We the people are simmering and at our wit’s end waiting for decisive action that never quite seems to make it to the very top of the infested pile of putrid human beings who have aided and abetted insurrection and excruciating injustice.

I can feel it. The burning, searing frustration with incompetence, inadequacy, inequality. The seeming unwillingness of those in charge to communicate clearly and directly. The inability of too many members of the media to address the outrage with integrity and intelligence.

The absolute vile and raging stupidity of Republican members of Congress refusing to embrace truth and find their spines. The stagnant acrid stench of their complicity and treachery reeks across this land like smoldering ruins of a five-alarm fire, for which they deliberately prevented emergency response. Yet the conspirators still roam free, fundraising and starting fires with impunity.

We’ve had the Jan 6 Congressional committee hearings to somewhat relieve the tension. Here in the desert, we’ve recently had surprising rainstorms that briefly alleviated sweltering temperatures. One prolonged shower even ended with a rainbow seen from my backyard that evening.

Will there be a rainbow for the US? With a pot of gleaming gold in the form of accountability and criminal convictions from those responsible for sending our nation and its people into a scorching thirst for a tall drink of water known as justice?

I’ve tried to bide my time and write about other things. To channel frustration into words and action in my most recent novel, Alien Sensation, and my next work in progress, Altogether Alien, both of which uncannily include active volcanoes. But the words don’t come easily, because action is in short supply.

I’m weary of holding villains accountable in my Other Worldly series while watching them freely and gleefully perpetuate flamingly incendiary lies and hate in real life, including far too many lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and one of their wives.

Those responsible for upholding laws at all levels appear to have burned all bridges of credibility—and of basic human decency. Corruption has built within like a slow-burning fire now raging as fast and as destructively to our once hallowed institutions as a wilderness wildfire.

The rule of law hangs in the balance, and it’s melting in the US faster than polar ice caps.

We’re at the height of summer heat, and the height of perhaps the greatest heated tensions this nation has ever known since the Civil War. Doing nothing is not an option simply because it might create greater tension. Because inaction is a grave disservice, a dangerously explosive incendiary device awaiting detonation.

The Constitution is on fire. This entire nation is ablaze with fury of those who are fed up with pacification of traitors who would burn our world to the ground and cold-bloodedly so. Just like they burned women as witches centuries ago.

No one is above the law. And the law is valid only if enforced with equity toward all. If not now, when? It will only get hotter. And more devastatingly destructive.