Pondering Our Life in the USA

What are your thoughts on this 2023 email to a college friend?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I was going through some old correspondence today and found this email I sent to an old college roommate dated 23 November 2023 [Note that that is over a year before the recent national elections]. I continue to wrestle with getting my head around most of these topics (some I have given up on), but still they are relevant, particularly the part where we need to have deep discussions regarding “the common good”, not just for the USA but for the world of humanity at large. Here is my somewhat anonymized email, please let me know your thoughts.

I hope you all have Thanksgiving plans with family this year. Linda and I are spending a small celebration dinner with our youngest daughter, her husband, and their son. Then we are off on Friday for Las Vegas to celebrate my 65th birthday (it was originally planned for Maui but the fires forced a cancelation of our reservation there — no other properties available to use anywhere in the Hawaiian islands or the Caribbean during this timeframe so Vegas it is).

As for your question to me regarding our current milieu against the backdrop of violence in the Middle East (and the polarization of politics and culture going on around the world to varying degrees), I am reminded of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poem, “The…