The Boomer Discovers The Real America

It’s Saturday night. The Boomer and his wife don’t feel like doing much so they crank up the PVR and watch this week’s installment of America’s Got Talent.
This is one of the Boomer’s favorite shows. He has been watching it for a couple of years now and while he can barely remember any of the winners of past seasons, he finds the show terribly entertaining.
This is mainly because he gets to see stuff on this show that you just don’t see every day. Where else, he thinks, would you see someone swinging his sister around on roller skates, and all she is holding onto is his beard.
Yes, the Boomer concludes, it really doesn’t get much more entertaining than that.

The Discovering The Real America Part

America’s Got Talent is the quintessential American Dream show. The majority of contestants come from America. But there is a healthy infusion of acts from other countries, who are quick to point out that the Good Old American Dream is what they are pursuing.
They are also quick to admit that the opportunity to win a million bucks and headline their own show in Las Vegas is something that is simply not available where they come from.
When the Boomer heard a Korean kid, who was part of a hip hop dance troupe, say that, half the penny that dropped that night in his head hit the floor of his brain and was computed there.
The other half of the penny, dropped a little while later when he started actually paying attention the back stories that accompanied each American contestant’s performance.
These people had whole families, whole neighborhoods and sometimes even whole cities supporting them. What really crystallized his thoughts on this was that one young girl, a very good 14-year-old ventriloquist from Oklahoma City, was given a parade and a special congratulation from the city’s mayor just for making it to the semi-finals.

This was certainly, the Boomer thought, a testament to the power of television because America’s Got Talent is very highly rated.
But more than that…what he was seeing over and over and over again, was the real America. An America that has nothing to do with what he would see by flipping over to some 24-hour news channel.
No, this was the America that cheered for people to succeed, that supported their efforts, that realized the value and the power of community. This was the America that was too mundane and upbeat for anyone to fashion a scandal from.
But mostly, he thought, this was the real America.
When this insight fully manifested in his head, he realized that to a certain extent he had, like so many others, been sucked in by the unreal version of America that is really nothing more than a bunch of flies buzzing around a turd called Trump.

He has watched the long, slow, painful political suicide of that particular turd, and while he got a perverse pleasure out of all the pot shots he was able to take at him, the image of the real America, one that got along perfectly well before this turd came along and will get along just fine after he is gone, was a much more interesting place than Washington DC and all its bullshit could ever be.
In that moment, and in the moments that followed where he saw the alt-right immigration protest in Boston dwarfed by good people protesting the protest, then saw the same thing happening in his own country, he realized yet again, that the reality of life and the reflection of it in the news are two wildly different things.
Though this was not any sort of new revelation, it was a gratifying one, because it meant that the Boomer was now free to turn the corner and look down a new street, one that wasn’t cluttered with turds called politicians and filthy black flies called lobbyists and CEOs.
I could, he thought, be A Boomer Of The People. Then he laughed because in his heart he knew he had no control over what he could or could not be.
Just like all the rest of us.

This is Boomer Post #8. Other posts in this series can be read at https://www.bebee.com/@jim-murray

Jim Murray is a marketer and communication strategist, writer, art director, 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 find out more about us at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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