There’s Cancer in Our American Family

Feels Like We’re All Hangin’ In the Hall Outside an Intensive Care Unit

Meri Aaron Walker
New Writers Welcome
5 min readJul 20, 2024

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When the Center Will Not Hold, 1. © 2024, Meri Aaron Walker, iPhoneArtGirl. All rights reserved.

OK, Friends.

After watching parts of the parade of strong men at the RNC circus — including Trump’s 90 minutes of utter madness — and the last month of watching the Democratic Party doing to Joe Biden just what the guilty mob did to Robert Oppenheimer after he spent his genius doing the bidding of the American war machine, I’m clear that we are sliding — in slow motion — into WWIII.

How so? The democrats and independents are crucifying Joe Biden because he’s not Superman while the new-republican cousins deify Trump. Climate change fueled storms are raging and war is spreading across the globe as refugees of both climate change and war scramble for safer shelter on every continent.

It’s come clear to me over the last month that this nation is riddled with a cancer so virulent that our precious experiment with democracy is, in fact, collapsing around us. There’s cancer in the American family.

Cancer in the American Family. © 2024, Meri Aaron Walker, iPhoneArtGirl. All rights reserved.

I couldn’t sleep last night after watching Hulk Hogan, the CEO of the Ultimate Fight Club, Chris Rock, Franklin Graham, and Lee Greenwood deify Trump. And that was before God took the stage for 90 minutes.

This morning, I’m feeling like those of us who can see what MAGA is doing to eat Truth alive are hanging in the hall outside an intensive care unit, bare-knuckling it, hoping (with the barest shred of hope) that our wildly diverse American family can survive the death of Democracy 1.0.

Trump said he doesn’t want to be president of half the nation: he wants to be president of the whole “unified” nation which he says his “movement” will usher — very quickly — to its “destiny.” Those words sent a cold chill through me that literally had me wrapped in my winter bathrobe to calm myself in the middle of July.

This RNC made it crystal clear what “unifying” the nation means to Christian Nationalists. It means installing a theocracy in Washington with Donald Trump as God.

Being just one old hippie woman with one vote left to cast, the shred of hope I’m hanging onto as we surf this tsunami through to the next election is that Trump and the MAGA machine are WRONG thinking that HALF the nation is under their trance.

I think there are a whole lot more Americans than just HALF of us who are not ready to flush the possibility of democracy down the toilet of history. We are still somewhat free, thinking, loving human beings, who may have, in the past, affiliated with one political party or another. But we are not citizens poised to capitulate either our agency or our humanity as the American Family navigates the transformation of leadership in our nation.

Hell-bent on crucifying Joe Biden for collapsing under the onslaught of a deliberate, vicious, narcissistic attack that the Media called “a debate,” whatever the Democratic Party tapes together and calls “new leadership” in the next 30 days will not stop the civil war in which we are already fully engaged.

We-the-people have so MUCH TO DO to mend our tattered nation. Whoever is drafted into a “leadership” position for the Democratic Party will be riding a wild mustang to the election. With we-the-people shattered into three dozen angry tribes, if we can manage to elect anyone but Trump, we will still have decades of reconciliation work ahead of us if we are going to discover an honest democracy, a Democracy 2.0.

Nevertheless, being an old hippie woman whose consciousness was opened a long time ago by psychedelics, it’s my bet that all of us — the we who are more than just half of we-the-people — are fully capable of weathering this reckoning together as a diverse people. I’ve spent 74 years working in all manner of ways with all kinds of people trying to carve a path to an honest democracy. And I know there are millions of others like me.

Yet, I’m honestly feeling today, in mid-July of 2024, like I’m hangin’ with my brothers and sisters in the hall outside an intensive care unit knowing full well that our beloved democracy won’t make it through this cancer if we simply allow our cousins, the Christian Nationalists, to take over the family and demand that everybody just does things their way.

All of us in the other more-than-half of the American family (democrats, independents, and non-MAGA republicans) are going to have to get out the vote AND also be ready — if we successfully stop Trump at the ballot box — to stand together for dignity and free choice and justice for us ALL in the next peaceful transition of power.

Should it survive this cancer, the next iteration of democracy — will reveal it’s first generation as the fantasy it’s always been. Power in the next generation of democracy can’t come from anything other than love, peace and happiness: for everybody. No more takers at the top and everyone else on the bottom.

Otherwise, we-the-people are going to just be toast. Soggy toast for any of us left living on the coasts of the continent. Burned toast for any us of left living in the interior or near former forests.

I would love to live long enough to see the next generation of democracy flower here in the United States. But, I’m already old, so I won’t be holding my breath.

Well, to any of you who have read this far, thank you. Am I making any sense to you? God, I hope so.

I so want to hear what you think and feel. Please do tell me.

But, if you don’t see the humanity in my point of view, please pass on by.

I don’t want to argue about how I’m making sense of all this in mid-July 2024. I just need to speak my mind before the next layer of madness erupts and the cancer cells spread further. Like uncontained wildfire.

I fully understand and expect that all my American brothers and sisters have their own perspectives on what’s going on.

Ever since I was a little kid growing up on the streets of a seriously diverse neighborhood in Washington DC, it’s been my great joy to share diverse perspectives while working and playing with others to keep America safe for diversity.

Let’s get out the vote!

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Meri Aaron Walker
New Writers Welcome

Writing my way out from under the cloud of confusion I've called home for seven decades. Learning from readers, other writers and my own mobile images.