Misunderstanding

28 January 2026

There was a time, long ago, when I was in my teens and twenties, that I intentionally permitted myself to be misunderstood.  I’d like to say it was for the greater good, as I’ve watched this situation transpire with our heroic President; but it was for the sake of survival, which, one could say, is a greater good.

Once a person has submitted herself, and subjected herself, to that unkind treatment of her self, there’s not much that she can do to undo it.  I had to live with the mis-perceptions of who I am, because, at the time, I didn’t have the liberty to be who I truly was.

The time did come when I was freer to show my true face to others, without fear of being hurt, betrayed, used, callously or cleverly manipulated.  The cost to my self was costly, indeed.

As I look back upon that phase of my life, I still feel sadness for the individuals who wanted to crack the shell of my aloof exterior, but I wouldn’t let them.  The loss was mine as well as theirs.  I learned to vow to try to not repeat a pattern of holding my cards so close to my chest that I very nearly wasn’t even in the game.

My life resembled a trading post, wherein I bartered what I needed against what others needed.  Once in a while, I’d find a kindred spirit in which to confide my worries and solitude.  I recall those friends-of-the-heart because they were few in number, and our time together was limited, and ephemeral.  It was a part of my life that somewhat ended once I was married and raising a family.  Aa the years passed by, I almost forgot that, once upon a time, I’d had to live that way.

The past decade recalled to me, although dredged-up is a more accurate term, that transient, transitory and weirdly untrustworthy flow of shifty and shiftless people moving, helter-skelter, in the midst of the confusion and chaos they’d created for themselves — but blamed on every one else.

The rush of people who have spent years going in the wrong direction is a constant factor in life.  Perhaps there are times when you encounter that rush more than others.  I believe the turning points of the past ten years brought into relief the lost souls, the demented souls, and the benevolent souls who find themselves traveling along the same highways, though rarely for the same reasons.

Voyaging with travelers who aren’t fellow companions rarely feels comfortable.  These unsettled times in which we live have forced many of us to journey in ways not of our making or of our choosing.  It takes a wise person to admit to being wrong about the path, or paths, he’s taken.  It takes an even wiser person to admit to having been a fool for having believed those paths were headed in the right direction.

Years from now, people might look back upon this past decade of tumultuous discoveries, sickening awarenesses of wretched betrayals, and nearly surreal realities, and realize that the only ways to right a ship that had been moving, full-steam ahead, in the wrong direction — is through a patient, methodical, and audacious series of extraordinary, though agonizingly slow, changes to the power-structures in America, and to the perceptions that Americans stubbornly held toward those power-structures.

We cannot turn around this mighty ship of state in a New York minute.  The wall against We the People has been attacked, at its base; the crumbling — of decades of demoralization, fiscal exploitation, bribery and publicly-funded crime — is underway.

When it comes to real change in governance, it’s not merely the economy, stupid.  It’s the will of God, working through each of us, every day, to turn the tide toward One Nation, Indivisible, Under God.