Can you believe we once had a president who assured us that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?”

I get earnestly patriotic–and I mean without any tinge of irony–when I pause to think of all the things that have made our nation a good place to live in and the rights and privileges we as Americans have come to cherish, enjoy and frequently take for granted, and how far too many of these things have been actively and steadily dismantled right in front of our very eyes since around the time we reached voting age.

Here’s the deal, see:

I want to live my adult life in a place where I can be paid to do things that will engage me–preferably in a way that is socially productive in some way–for the majority of my life, and then retire in peace.
I want to make just enough money to be financially independent enough as to not worry about it too often, to have lodging where I can sleep comfortably through storms, and to allow me and anyone I share my table with to eat good, interesting, healthy food all of the time.
I want to be generally content with things more often than I am not, including but by no means limited to: supporting education as one of if not the most important investment we can make in our nation at any point in history, that women (and men) have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and health, that people can travel and communicate freely without fear or persecution, and that children deserve safe places to play during the time in their lives when they don’t have to worry about these kind of adult concerns because, hey, they’re just kids.
I want to love and be loved, and for the sanctity of love to be acknowledged and cherished between any two people who are lucky enough to find it.
I want to kick this manipulative, polarizing, ignorance-feeding, fear-mongering, hate-breeding sorry excuse for a political administration and their ilk in the nuts, hard and repetitively.

In any order, that would pretty much about do it.

I don’t particularly see myself ever running for any kind of public office aside from being an informed participant in our fragile “experiment in democracy,” but I’ll be damned if I let the next person who tells me I’m wrong for thinking any of the above get off the hook easily.

That is all.