Djelloul Marbrook

Our national story that we’re an egalitarian society won’t stand up to cross-examination. The entire middle class is crashing into the chasm between rich and poor. The media moguls have convinced us that we don’t want news, we want infotainment. The idea stinks of greed. They know perfectly well infotainment is cheap, news is expensive to gather. But the idea is as addictive as meth. It hooks us on celebrities: spoiled brats we wouldn’t want to dinner, people who live obscenely selfish lives, the sort of people we hope our kids won’t grow up to be. And once we’re hooked on celebrity, blindness sets in—blindness to the real heroes in our midst. Ourselves. The frail, neglected elderly trying to face the end with dignity, the kid coping with the school bully, the farmers squeezed by developers and agribusiness, the little homeowner and shopkeeper bullied by eminent domain, the men and women staring disease in the face, the families forced to hold down two and three jobs to keep up a semblance of middle class prosperity, the contrarians who oppose wars or relentless tax breaks for those who least need them, the dissenters of every stripe whom the government is now trying to smother.

We’re the heroes of our national story, not the loudmouths in
government or the know-it-alls in the media. We need to take back our story. We need to take it out of the hands of liars and stooges. We need to tell them that we know life is not another Japanese gameboard. We need to tell them that no matter how many games dispatch humanoids like ninepins we know that death is real and that our foreign policy should be based on our ideals and not the greed and callousness of a handful of rajahs who’ve already had too much of everything.

Since when do we have to prove our love of our men and women in uniform by kissing the heinies of liars who send them to war under phony pretenses to make their cronies rich? Since when do we have to prove our patriotism by hocking our smarts and shutting our mouths? We’re the patriots and the heroes. We don’t need fat cats telling us who’s who and what’s what. Every time you go to a nursing home or a gas station or the market or the landfill you see heroes, and they’re not yakking at you from pulpits and rostrums, they’re not trying to dope you on infotainment. They’re just doing what heroes always do, facing up and soldiering on.

Societies get into trouble when they turn blind eyes to their real heroes and start thinking they’re guys who talk out of the sides of their mouths like our vice president or dispatch hundreds of disposable extras like California’s governor or talk around the bush until we get migraines like certain Democratic presidential candidates we know.

We’re the heroes, working, getting downsized, seeing our dreams exported, getting told to climb a telephone tree, being buried under paperwork, falling sick and not having the money to get well, shipped off to die for empty suits whose own sons and daughters are safe at home. We, the invisibles, we’re our heroes, and the worst fear of the mucky-mucks is that we’ll wake up and see ourselves in the mirror.