Charlottesville...Hopefully the Wake Up Call America Needed.

I came home from a networking event last night. My wife, Heather, was down in the family room watching CNN. She looked at me with eyes that had been crying and told me that she had been watching some news stories about the domestic terrorism that took place in Charlottesville Virginia on the weekend.
My wife is one of the best and most human people I know. I am very lucky to have her. But she has been around the block a few times, and what she had seen rocked her, as I'm sure it did many of us, right to her core.
We talked about it a bit, but there was very little I could say other than to express my hope that the widespread coverage of these horrendous events and the complete absence of any sincere condemnation by the so called president would be the wake-up call that the country needed to start the process of getting rid of this racist, fascist regime, and replacing it with something much more "American".
I have been, in my own way, contributing to the resistance movement in the US. Because as someone who grew up right next to and in Buffalo New York I have a deep love for that country and a deep concern with what is going on down there.
It's easy to put this all on Trump. He's such a big target. But there's a lot more to it than that.
Trump is just the manifestation of a great divide between the left and the right in America that probably can trace its origins back to the 1950s, and has been growing ever since.
Today's America is chronically dysfunctional, because this political divide has turned into a battleground. Nobody listens to anyone who doesn't share their point of view. And nobody really seems to want to.
But this weekend, IMHO, a group of disgruntled, ignorant, bigoted white guys carrying Nazi and Confederate flags and armed to the teeth, constructed a narrow bridge between this ideological divide.
And it is my most sincere hope that this can be built into a turning point where the left and the right can find some common ground and come to the realization that the only way to get things back into some semblance of control in their country is to unite around common causes, and start talking to and listening to one another again.
I wrote this poem this morning as kind of a prayer and a hope.
Because I don't want to lose hope, and I don't want anyone who wants this world to be a great place for humans to live to ever give up hope.
Because contrary to what a lot of people might think...hope is, indeed, a strategy. And these days it's possibly the best one we have.

Jim Murray is a marketer, communication strategist, writer, art director and blogger. His partner, Charlene Norman is a business systems and operational analyst. Their collaboration is called Bullet Proof Consulting, headquartered in St Catharines, Ontario. Bullet Proof is designed to help companies change their thinking for the better, to become more productive, efficient better branded and successful in today’s highly competitive business world.
You can get a very clear impression of how we think by reading our business blogs at www.bulletproofconsulting.ca/blog

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