Ashamed to Be an American
It happened so quickly. Remember Election Night 2008? I do. I was proud of my country, proud of a people who had looked beyond race, who had chosen a President whose platform was about progress, inclusion, diversity, and thinking and talking through problems. For the first time in a decade, I was proud to be an American. That pride lasted for the better part of a year and then, just like that, it fell away. I hadn't given up on my President, or the Congress who swept into office with him. Not most of them, anyway. I was thrilled that Washington was engaged in the hard work of expanding the social safety net to include health insurance, and while it frustrated me that so many Democratic legislators had bought the snake oil of the insurance company and were opposed to a single payer system, I still had hope that they could put together something that covered far more Americans than the previous system. But I was already growing jaded at the knee-jerk resistance of the Re...