America is broken. It prompts the question: was it ever not broken? According to the MAGA crowd, there was a time when it was great—a nation that inspired praise and intense patriotism and loyalty.        

There was a time in my life when a prolonged rebellion against the old order (the same one that MAGA praises) occurred, challenging the temples of classism, racism, ageism, fascism, sexism, homophobia, and other anti-human rights, and some of these structures fell, even if only for a brief moment. 

That was then.

This is now.

We are broken.

There’s video evidence everywhere. Facebook. Twitter, now X. Especially Twitter, now X. Instagram. TikTok. I’ve even seen evidence on Truth Social, a Trumpian fountain of irreconcilable conflict between reality and fantasy.

You know things are horrible when the liars are lying about lying.

The videos show that Americans hate each other so much that their faces contort from the short-circuiting anger gripping their hearts in headlocks. If someone could put their heart in a headlock, this is what it would look like.

Mobs of black, white, and brown teenage girls and boys, no matter the race, are fighting each other until someone cannot get up anymore. 

Americans we call Karen and Ken, with spit running down their mouths onto their polyester rayon shirts and sweaters bought at their local Kroger or Marshall, insisting they are the guides to the truth and that I am in the way. 

Or the traffic stop that turns deadly because one side is focused on power, and the other party just wants to get home. 

“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you can’t reach.” – Strother Martin as Captain in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke

I love that movie.

It’s terrible out here. You better believe it.

I haven’t touched on politics, and I’m already disheartened that America still hasn’t learned from its history. The fight over who this country belongs to is crazy. How do we define a nation? Is it land? Or institutions? Or history? It’s not like there’s a deed somewhere with my or your name on it. 

All I know is that within that debate, something terrible is unfolding. The idea of the United States of America, a people united behind a concept of liberty and justice for all, all those lost words that have become meaningless to Americans or to those willing to die trying to become Americans.

There is a war going on. People are screaming at each other over stupid shit. Meanness has replaced kindness. Empathy has been replaced by antipathy. Threats against persons are commonplace. A gun, a knife, and fists are now the preferred communication tools.

Both ends of the political spectrum are gearing up for conflict, and many of us are left wondering, “Should I buy a gun or move?” (move where?) because we all suspect that a civil war is imminent (it’s already here, but in respect to my friends who say I’m exaggerating, I say it’s coming), and it’s not going to be pretty.

First, I can’t afford a gun except maybe a Nerf Gun, and I may want to kill some people sometimes, but I know I don’t have the cojones to pull a trigger (I’m a lover, not a fighter) or am I ready for the ugly truth that it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Somewhere in this country (Texas, Florida), the next generations of Americans are being taught a 1950s version of American history where everyone knew their place (can we, like, forget those pesky reminders of class, race, and gender warfare and the laws that came out of those battles?).

Yeah, some people prefer to burn our memories so we forget them and replace them with a more peaceful image of patriotic Americans waving red, white, and blue flags, carrying AR-15s, wearing a mask of revenge, and showing a ‘I don’t give a fuck’ snarl that’s now a license to intimidate, whether we like it or not.

America is head-deep in some serious history-making post-World War II chaos here. I mean, I thought I’d seen it all—from the fifties anti-communism hysteria to the era of Obama. 

But this? A darkness worse than 1968, 2001, even January 6, 2021.

There was a choice. The safe option (and I wasn’t happy about that) was the same old, same old, even though there was a chance of history being made with the first woman President (but we knew that was unlikely). What we truly needed was fresh ideas, a new perspective, and real change. I long for those good old days. 

On the other side, oh my, what can I say? You didn’t think we would let you people take this country away from us? What do you mean, YOU people?

I honestly didn’t know who was more frightening: the usual or the person who believes America needs to go back to that time, a hundred and three years ago, to find the real America — when men were men and women were… well, women who couldn’t vote. 

Or maybe, at a time when only white men who owned land could vote (any time before 1954 would be fine).

I’ve witnessed a lot of American history and hysteria in my seventy-six years. It’s not like I’ve understood everything I’ve seen, but I suspected back then, even when I was a ten-year-old child in 1958 in the South Bronx, that something was very wrong with America.

All that talk about the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star-Spangled Banner, and that all men are created equal didn’t really mean it applied to everyone—only white people, preferably men. 

Then I was told that certain people had to earn their freedom, not yet, but soon, and that those people wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. Freedom is earned, not given for free (What?).

I wondered who they were talking about. I was sure the ten-year-old with a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother thought all that talk about freedom was for someone else. That discussion didn’t apply to me. Hell, I was born American, and I was free.

Then, three years later, I discovered in an all-white school that no, they were also talking about me as they shouted racial insults and thought it was cute to call me Pancho.

We are broken. We’ve always been broken, but since the sixties, I believed we could heal. Now, here we are, and I don’t know how or even if we can fix ourselves. I don’t think you can pass a law to heal us, or think you could start over and try again, or decide to ignore it and go about your business, hoping someone comes up with a fix. 

I worry about the America my sons and granddaughter will face as they grow older in ten, twenty, or even thirty years—when we’re meant to become a nation with a majority of people of color. All I can hope for is that we’re lucky enough to reach that point alive and healthy. 

It’s just that, right now, it doesn’t look good from here in 2025.