“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” – Maya Angelou, né Marguerite Annie Johnson (1928-2014)
When someone shows you who he is and significant numbers of fellow Americans desire that he be returned to the highest office in the land, what am I to believe about us as a nation?
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Photograph: Maya Angelou by Deborah Feingold Corbis
occasional observations of mind and heart, soul and spirit 
Paul,
I’m just not sure what to believe about us as a nation!
Love
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Paul,
I echo your bafflement about who we are as a nation. I have long believed that Maya Angelou’s wisdom about how to know a person’s character is rock-solid as well as fair. The cart of rationalization politics long ago left the honorable leadership horse far behind. We live in extremely ugly times.
Love,
Karen
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My dearest Loretta and Karen, cutting to the chase, I, too, am baffled. Oft, I don’t know what to think about us, the American nation. There are moments when I muse to myself that it — that state of our nation — always has been this way. That is, with widely disparate beliefs and practices in perspectives, in values and mores (and, here, I do not mean the varied social/cultural “beings and doings” related to the vast sea of ethnicities and races that make America America). In this point of view, I think that it is part and parcel of our Information Age of instantaneous communication that I/we are aware (indeed, more…most cognizant) of our individual attitudes, thoughts and feelings…
This said, if it holds a grain of truth, then I reside in an uneasy comfort. For if we’ve always been this way, nothing has changed. Alas, that is not so. For, whether we, as a nation, always have been the proverbial “all over the place” (or not), we live in an age, clearly, when and where many, with what I shall term alternate points of view to the uniting principle of “one nation under God” are able and willing to express, in word and deed, their animus to individuals and groups representing “the other”.
I fear for our nation.
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