It’s the long long road

I’d better put it down before I forget. 12 days on the road. Almost 4,000 miles. Some stretches were with “Fines double” signs. Other bridges that go nowhere. Eisenhower was so impressed with the German autobahn. Upon his return, he set out to remodel the US highway system (mostly to accommodate the logistics of transporting tanks and artilleries). Besides the road. I noticed:

• people are struggling to meet ends meet (a Walmart cashier – few of them left now that we’re at near full automation – boasted she got one more hour on her shift)
• a Vietnamese homeless person slept on a restaurant bench (designed for wait-list guests to be seated) in broad day light
• hotel front desk obviously was not paying much attention to the debt ceiling crisis. Instead, just a basket ball game
• Floridian and folks everywhere else on my itinerary are overweight
• Memorial weekend turned to Memorial Week, in post-Covid time
• Can’t see the White House, and the Vietnam Memorial by just driving through D.C. (oh well, I meant to).
• Few hitchhikers if any (I saw only one) were on the road. People are desperate, but fear is stronger than exhaustion
• Smaller hotel chains e.g. Hilton, Hampton Inn and Howard Johnson rule.

Two different versions of America: one in stock video (the kind of State Department shows overseas) and the other, real folks I met. Red States tend to keep to themselves. Blue States turn “rainbow”. It’s the landscape that dictates everything. Vast land, few opportunities. Manufactured crisis amplified via Social Media.

It’s reality. It’s painful. It’s my country too. Black folks, White folks and Brown folks. My fellow citizens. Came with big dreams. Few attained them (that’s my bench!). Buddhist temples saw an opportunity to expand (tax exemption), inadvertently, beating the Evangelicals at their own game.

I stopped at Chow King near Fort Payne. I wonder when and if the US goes to war with China, what would be the fate of folks working there. Will they once again be interned at camps?

We can solve the border crisis by negative ad campaigns, targeting South Americans who are desperate to come (by showing them Uvalde, smog in NYC, homeless occupying bus stops, overweight folks in trucks that need a ladder to climb into etc…).

Once we had high hopes, that America welcomes the huddle mass, and Hollywood shows Bel Air and Rodeo Drive, that Obama could be President for two consecutive terms.

Good luck to all, myself included. We need to make it happen. In the word of Admiral William H McRaven “Start with making your bed”. I can only add one little thing: “then look at yourself in the mirror, preferably without clothes”.

See, my travel takes me in full circle. I can see the problem now. It’s US.