America Interrupted Dispatch.
Christine Merser, May 5, 2025
I am changing the name of American Memoir 2025 to America Interrupted Dispatch. There are a lot of reasons based on market research, but it’s more than that.
I realize now that the day Trump took office, January 20, 2017, our lives were interrupted. More importantly, our country's trajectory was interrupted. A change in destination. And we didn’t see it coming. Like the silent creep of a silent deadly cancer. We might have had symptoms, but we didn’t recognize them. Notice them. Worse than that, we thought we had no symptoms at all. We thought we were making such progress, when all the while, the disease eating the soul and fundamental organs of our country’s destiny was all around us, and we chose to look away.
Slavery. Incarcerating the Japanese. Black voter suppression. Hundreds, now thousands of school shootings. Billionaires in places like the Hamptons paying their immigrant landscapers and housekeepers - kind, hardworking, dedicated, pleasant people - pennies on the dollar. And making their billions on tax evasion gifts they purchased on both sides of the aisle. We were MIA.
Right now, in Aspen, where billionaires abound, hotel employees sleep in their old cars in the hotel parking lots, while Vail Resorts netted over a billion dollars in profit last year. Those lucky enough to get a shared bed inside the hotel where they work? They have $800 deducted from their tiny paychecks each month. Meanwhile, our white middle class died, and somehow, we didn't notice. They are working for minimum wage, sometimes three jobs, and no health care or hope for their children to do better.
And billionaire’s jets land in Aspen more than five times a day, while those serving them sleep in cars?
So here we are.
The prognosis by some who supposedly specialize in our form of cancer, is terminal. Too far advanced to recover.
But, I don’t agree. We are not Nazi Germany, or Hungary, or any other template. We are the United States of America, who are no longer united. There is always hope. There is always someone who beats the odds of cancer's death sentence. Why can't my country be the one that recovers.
This Substack column is not my personal memoir anymore. It is my putting ‘pen’ to paper to mark where we are day by day from my perspective. Centuries of lies in how we saw ourselves as a nation finally being uncovered. "We see you" takes on new meaning.
To us, waking up and taking the hit for what we didn’t know was happening around us, and inside us, as we busied ourselves with our fabulous daily lives, is the chemotherapy we must endure to get back on track. Actually, not back on track, but rather to pave a new track.
No matter what happens going forward, this moment in history is America Interrupted.
And from this place of despair and seeming irreparability, we can rebuild.
Maybe not in who runs the country, at least not right away. That remains to be seen.
But we can fix what is broken where we still have agency.
Where we spend our money.
How we treat others, both in the bigger picture and outside our small, comfortable circles.
What we read.
How we spend our time. How we hold accountable those we vote for and support.
Oh my God, what an opportunity. To see things as they are, not as we were led to believe they are.
America from scratch.
One step at a time.
One citizen at a time.
A growing number of us, finally facing the music that we helped compose, that was a mistake.
And we will do better.
We can do better.
I thank those who read my column for your input, your challenging my thinking, your support, your sharing, and your commitment which matches my own to Persist. We will never stop trying.
- Christine Merser
Me too, and now I'm carrying cash... cash... why should the banks get $$ around a transaction they had nothing to do with and is taken out of the store's profits????
I have switched to shopping - as much as possible-at my local small shops instead of places like Amazon. It’s definitely costing more and that hurts but I feel better.