This. Totally this for me.
I have felt like I want to puke all day so far, and it will only get worse.
I love my country. I love it so much it hurts. It has given my family opportunity for generations. It has been a place that is and always has been wildly imperfect yet, somehow, has found a way to improve over time. As they say, "reformed, but always reforming." We are a good country, and we have tried over time to become a great one. It is a process, but one that - for most of my life - I believed we continued to move towards. Yes, with failures, yes, with missteps, but overall heading in the right historical direction.
The past 15+ years have caused me to doubt that (Obama's election revealed how awful a huge swath of our country and fellow citizens are, and it has only gotten MUCH worse).
I truly don't know who "we the people" are anymore. I don't believe, like I once did, that we can and will find ways to be better.
I want to hope that we will. But hope, in these times, is a precursor to disappointment. And we've had a cascade of disappointments, shocking ones. To my dying day, I will never forget those moments on January 6th when, driving through nowhere W. Texas, I heard them announce that the insurrectionists had broken through and were inside the Capitol. As our phones started blowing up from friends all over the world asking us "WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?"
I want to believe that we can be the nation I knew and believed in most of my life. But I also know that we are the nation that had January 6th, and might have another one of those.
This feeling is like being in crisis with someone you deeply love. Will she go off the deep end, turning her back on all the things that made her good, and leading you to the inevitable conclusion of "she's gone....this relationship isn't worth saving?" Or will she find her way to reaffirm the best of who she is and can be, so you think "there she is....the person I love is still there?" I feel like I would if I was sitting in my living room, waiting for her answer. And yeah, I wanna puke.
I love her. And she's been breaking my fucking heart.