Drawing word pictures on a cerebral canvas
Artists draw images on canvas with a brush disbursing a full panoply of hues blended on a pallet to capture the most subtle and evocative expressions of reality and surreality. Authors draw verbal images on the canvas of the psyche limited by only the imagination. Fiction can provide an epiphany of understanding unraveling or distorting complex and convoluted ideations.
The following fairy tale is written to dab the reader’s cerebral paintbrush onto the canvas of the mind.
Not long ago there was an enchanted Promised Land. Its fertile fields and open ranges were adorned with mighty snow capped mountains, crystal clear rivers, and glistening lakes. Tranquil hamlets and vibrant cities bespeckled the fabric of its majestic cloth. Lady Liberty held a torch of welcome which radiated a beacon of liberty and justice to the downtrodden and oppressed.
Yet all wasn’t well in the Promised Land. Streets once paved with golden opportunities were potholed, jolting its alignment out of kilter. Its economy swayed on a bipolar teeter-totter of spiraling inflation and vortex of deepening recession. Its borders hemorrhaged undocumented immigrants. Illicit substances peddled by cartel mercenaries of the Grim Reaper poured through its porous sieve. There was no tourniquet to staunch the flow.
Those hooked by angling law-enforcement officers were caught and released like fish. Its dwellers awoke to the reveille of mass shooting thunderclaps.
The threat of indiscriminate mayhem perpetrated by fanatic ideologues, foreign and domestic, lurked in the shadows. Racism, as the abuse and misuse of corporate and governmental authority, lingered on from bygone days. These ailments afflicting the anatomy of the Promised Land elevated its blood pressure to the point of suffering a stroke of insurrection.
The Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, were tyrannical regimes which would salivate like Pavlov’s dog at the military vanquishment of the Promised Land. In an age of hypersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles, the consequence of direct military aggression at best would result in a pyrrhic victory, at worst suicide.
Electronic weapons launched into cyberspace and propelled by artificial intelligence detonated fissionable disinformation which severely undermined the Promised Land by exacerbating its already festering self-inflicted tumult.
There is an assumption that when the lion and the lamb face a common crisis or foe, they will lay down together in order to survive. In the case of entrenched civil acrimony and divisiveness, the opposite is true.
The fractures generated by shearing faults of animosity registered tremors of intensity on a scale of societal instability greater than geophysical quakes seismologically registered on the Richter scale.
The Promised Land faced deeply entrenched animosities and hostilities which were continuously increasing in magnitude. They generated a firestorm which was fanned in its wake by howling gales of blazing acrimony.
There came a time when enough was enough. Even bad choices were considered better than abiding by the status quo. A raging inferno can be quelled by setting a fire creating a buffer of scorched earth in its path.
A contender vying to again become the Promised Land’s Matador in Chief predicted that if the opponent’s bull should prevail, the Promised Land will be gored to death. There would no longer be a home on the range. Hardcore disciples are waging a holy war to ensure that the matador will smite the bull, come hell or high water.
Once elected, he vows to drain the swamp, pardon himself and his clamorous cronies, and retaliate in kind against his witch hunting foes.
The Promised Land will overcome adversity and be restored to a higher level of greatness only if its citizens grasp that, irrespective of the conservative or liberal timber swaying in the wind, it is necessary to chop down deadwood branches of discord with a sharpened axe honed by whetting stones of mutual compromise, conciliation, and cooperation. The rule of law must not be blown away like tumbleweed.
The critical question is whether or not the multi-hued spectrum of citizens on the pallet of the Promised Land will collectively meet this critical challenge.
The denouement of the story has not yet been written. It will be told in a concluding chapter following Nov. 5, 2024.