Americonned!

Or a 3 am drunk letter to America

What happened America? You used to be cool. Why do you choose to put a brake on your “truth, justice, and the American way”? Was I too optimistic about your intelligence or judgement to think that you are mature enough to embrace steady progress instead of fear and empty promises?  You had broccoli and an enigmatic bottle of coke in front of you and you chose the coke, which might not even be coke, with its artificial sweetener, sizzle, branding, carcinogen, and a promise to make you feel good. After 8 years of healthy diet, you chose to throw it all away for some crappy junk food because the new regime of healthy diet, while similar, tastes bland and not as great as the last one. You have never acted more like a petulant child than this act of electing a petulant child into office.

8 years ago you gave multiracial kids with a funny name everywhere hope that if they are smart and kind and eloquent and work really hard, they could one day attain a future, an “American dream”, that wasn't meant for someone with a humble or less than humble beginning. Now 8 years later, you have taken this hope and gifted it to every racist rich misogynist man by validating his fantasy that if he just taps into the most deplorable part of the human nature, he could again, as he has been doing throughout most of human history, attain the right to rule over all of masses by peddling fear, mistrust, and empty promises to the weak, old, and uneducated.

Why are you afraid of progress? After the enlightened years of JFK, Clinton, and Obama, you have chosen a crook, an idiot, a con man to replace them! All those improvements you have made on economy, equality, science, international relations, human rights, and stability could be all gone in the blink of an eye.  You know how hard it is to regain a reputation yet you didn't care.  I defended you, you know.  Despite all your shoddy history of not taking care of your own and meddling in others’ business, I told anyone who would listen that you were essentially good, that you might make mistakes but you always come through. I have always argued that it is better for you to be in charge of the world than someone else because you had principle and good intentions. I didn't think a country like yours which represents the best of democracy would go in the way of Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, Brexit's UK, Abbott's Australia, or Duterte’s Philippines. Now you have and maybe worse. You are no longer exceptional. You have just provided a modern master class of how to manipulate the masses or why democracy doesn’t work to all the totalitarian and religious fundamentalist regimes. How can I continue to defend you after you have given the most powerful position of the world to a con artist with no principle, no integrity, and no empathy. Yes, you have been conned and you don't know even know it.

Russia has fallen behind, EU has broken up, and China hasn't caught up. You were at the peak of your power like never before in history. Yet your bad judgement in the name of “making American great again!” has done the exact opposite.  You have chosen to isolate yourself, turned off your beacon of “freedom and democracy”, and relinquished your dominance to shirk responsibility to both your own people and the world.  Maybe you don’t want the responsibility of being the only superpower; maybe you wanted the thrill of being a rogue nation that could bomb the shit out of every country that you don’t like; maybe you just wanted to be a bully again.  But you could have done all these (and had done all these and more) without being asshole to your own people and your friends.

I want to believe in human decency. I want to believe in you. I want to hold on to my hope that you, or at least most of you, are decent. But in times like this, I would be delusional if I said that this belief and hope have not been wavered.  Your terrible choice has not only set yourself back. You might just have doomed us all.  You have been conned by a snake-oil salesman and his deplorables. You said that you wanted transparency, yet you have chosen a man who cannot even show you his tax returns. You said that you wanted to drain the swamp, yet you have chosen a man whose team consists of worst scums of the swamp. You said that you wanted to have a strong leader who can stand up to the world, yet you have chosen a man who kowtows to Putin. I don't know what you stand for anymore. Are all these reasons and slogans for choosing this con man just codes and euphemisms to be simply racist, sexist, and vile again? I don't want to believe it but I am starting to have no choice but to. You have been manipulated into choosing a fake strong man whose qualities are not unlike those of the corrupt banana republic dictators you had helped installed all over the world.  Is that it?  Are you tired of being on the top of the world? Do you simply want to be yourself again, to be bad again, to hold yourself to standard that is not befitting of your stature? What's even your stature or standard anymore? You have lowered yourself so much that I don't even know what to think anymore.   

I am not in an optimistic place where I think you could right this wrong in 4 or 8 or even 12 years. Hope is a dangerous thing especially in times like this but I cannot abandon all hope. Please don't lose heart. Though this mistake will haunt you forever when you pay for his retirement fund, when you erect his gaudy museum, and when you, and the rest of us, have to live through the consequence of his supreme courts and policies, I still want to believe and have the audacity to hope that you will one day recover from this and become a normal nation again like so many others have done before you.  If Rome can survive Nero and Caligula, you can survive this.