Other Side

I don't know but I but I been shown . . . this old note, found in the dark corner of a closet in the US Capitol, to whit:

I can see by your hat, my friend, You're from the other side There's just one thing I'd like to know: Can you tell me please, who won?

Four years and several months ago, our citizens brought forth to this Capitol, a new election, conducted in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that whichever candidate gets the most Electoral votes would become President.

Now we are engaged in a futile cultural war, testing whether this nation, or any other nation so conceived, can long endure. We are met on an unlikely battlefield of this contention, the democratic republic of the United States of America. Now we are online, to commemorate an appropriate part of our national memory for all men and women who, in years past, have given their lives, that this nation might live, and prosper, and remain free and protected by our Constitution and all subsequent laws that have provided, since our inception, a nation of the people, governed by the people, for all the people. It is altogether fitting and necessary that we do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot resolve - we cannot mend - the divisions that now threaten to blow our Union and our Rule of Law to smithereens. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we post here . . . in the awesome swirl of social media and the boogling blingly gobblydgook that occupies our attention so relentlessly on a windswept web that has entangled our attention in X-raided tweeter storms of outrageous fortune, and lobotomized our comprehension of profoundly complicated national issues, even as it stultifies and arrests our appreciation of democracy. . . it hath rendered us mere bronco-busters on the storms of outrageous fortune in this. . . our great, four-century-long grand rodeo. I mean, this ain't our first rodeo, if you know what I mean; we been around the 20th-century fox block a century or two, or three, or maybe even four if we don't get too plucky with our cultural contentions and our newfangled internet and our Make America Go Awry civil war that started on January sixth, back in the day. . . whenever that was. But I do feel it in my bones that this nation, under God, must have a new birth of goodwill toward all Americans, be they red or blue, be they many or few, be they old or new, be they immigrants new or citizens old, because back in the day when we used to pray we caught a glimpse of some lady standing at the golden door out there in the harbour with the torch of Liberty in her hand.

and she said send me your tired, your weary, your huddled masses yearning to be free, and I think it's time we raise Emma Lazarus' plea from the dead letters, and bring them back into the interstecies of twitterous time and googlish glob and wacky web confusion and contusions of contentious social mediocrity. There's a time for war and a time for peace! Lastly, as I once heard a little Byrd sing. . .I swear it's not too late.  Glass half-Full