As I gaze out my window at the calm azure lake bedecked by a shoreline of hillsides and forests, I work hard to exhume a sense of hope. Somewhere in my shadowed soul, I know it is there. At times I feel the pulse; I feel the happiness.

But alas, yesterday was another day in the life of America that will live in infamy. FDR would certainly use his time-honored phrase if he were witness to the barbaric interlopers reveling in the arena of falsehoods and conspiracies. No matter that the highest office in the land generates and swims in the same muck, there must be some sanity out there in the hinterlands of the country where these creatures emanate from.

I may lose a few friends and I may offend a few acquaintances, but I do not care. I do not wish to live in the land of the free when the only alternative is to make it less free by being subjected to a belief of exclusion and iconoclastic white, misogynistic, religious, supremacy. Because that, my dear reader, is exactly the paradox we face. Those who whine about freedom in turn wish to take your choices away. Margaret Atwood’s prediction of this alternate reality, seen recently by many in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” may have certainly come true if another four years of lies and deceit cavitied from the White House.

I was sickened yesterday and wept openly watching the sucking wound that has been opened since January 20^th, 2016. The “Lost Cause” continues and added another chapter to its endless line of babble and mind-numbing rationale. To not castigate such cacophony of hate and revulsion, is a slap at everyone who holds true to E Pluribus Unum.

The world has changed. The world continues to change, but some fly Nazi flags, Confederate flags, and militia flags, all bearing witness to a cloistered approach to a broadening humanity. Generations lost in the lack of knowledge or a distorted view of history and the lack of leadership find fashion with any lie and conspiracy that exudes hate; any belief that they are not free. Theirs is not a revolution of compassion or a contemplation of justice, no. Theirs is a stream of guttural abhorrence and vengeance because someone does not look like them; someone does not act like them. The homogenous world they seek does not exist beyond the four walls of their bricked-up brain. The mortar for which is filled with the blood of the innocent and textured by the manipulators of their minds.

In exhaling my diatribe, I find peace knowing I yearn for an open Universe welcoming all who may wish to join the rational majority who does understand that all are created equal. Put down your weapons of hate and open your hearts to the aura of hope lingering around the future where all may live together and celebrate in their differences. It is only fear that keeps you away.