The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My recent request for a visa to emigrate to my old country, my place of birth, was turned down yesterday, no reason given, but I suspect it’s due to the fact no one knows where that country is these days. It’s been moved or it’s become invisible, you tell me. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my old nation most of my life, probably because I reached so-called adulthood during the Viet Nam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King murder, the Chicago convention riots orchestrated by Mayor Daley, the Gulf of Tonkin and Tricky Dick. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the secret police and Watergate was about to unfold. It was hard for me to send Valentine cards to my place of birth back then.

But age has mellowed me. Or at least it’s made me more senile, more forgetful, maybe even more forgiving. Oh sure, there was that military mop-up in Panama, Grenada, the first Gulf War. Kind of brought back those bad memories of the 60’s and early 70’s. I guess I’d sort of dropped out for a few decades, moved to the edge of the continent, crossed onto the island and didn’t look back. Literally burned my TV, didn’t read newspapers, internet hadn’t been invented, life was, to use an overworked phrase, idyllic. The future looked okay, but I was mostly living in the present, not a bad place to live if you got a few acres, a roof, a part time job that pays the mortgage and covers the groceries, not bad at all.

You keep your nose to the ground, grow a garden, plant an orchard, build a house, you don’t spend as much time watching politics. Oh sure, there was that Iran/Contra war Reagan illegally funded with arms sales, covert for awhile. Clinton got himself impeached for chronic dickmanship, then Bush Junior invaded Iraq again after the Twin Trade Towers were toppled by bin Laden, a bad piece of intervention that will cost us and cost us and cost us again. Okay, I was starting to pay attention to national and world events, even voting, even got asked to run for county commissioner, that’s how above ground I stuck my head. You start to give a damn, you’re asking for trouble, real trouble.

Obama got himself elected right when the Great Recession started, the one where the banks and Wall Street gambled heavily with our money and lost, but even so, I got caught up in that Hope thingy of his, maybe America, if it could vote for a black guy, a half black guy anyway, as President, well, the future looked bright. Real bright. I guess I shoulda bought shades….

Well, somebody pulled the shades on that bright future anyway and his name was Trump. They’ve impeached him but no way are they gonna find him guilty with this sycophant Senate. Without a doubt the little huckster might win another four years in office and if so, he’ll want four or eight after that. My country is gone. And for some odd reason, not clear to me now, I want it back. The question I have, the one I have yet to answer, is why.

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