This is America

We're sitting in McDonalds tonight (this is significant, because McDonalds just screams american) and this guy comes in and sits behind us. Younger guy, looks like hes probably in his twenties, with a cowboy hat, wrangelers, shit-encrusted boots, and a loose t-shirt. Typical getup for any one of the fifty ag-students I went to highschool with, and any of the thousand farmers, dairy-hands, or otherwise "country-folk" who live in New Mexico. Its obvious as soon as he starts talking that he's a very simple man. Crude language, he has to fight to form even basic sentences, and I can't be sure, but I think he's producing more saliva than he's swallowing, because it looks very much to me like the man is drooling. He's nursing a dogbite on his arm. What he told us was that a six month old red heeler puppy that had been abused by prior owners had bit this man very recently, and he had "gotten a boot up his ass," for the inconvenience. Like kicking a beaten dog is going to make it less likely to bite someone. After convincing him to retire to the bathroom to clean the wound, he returns and requests assistance in applying adhesive bandages to his right forearm. McDonalds brand bandages, with Grimace, and Ronald McDonald, and all of the other cheesey hamburger chain characters described in neon purples and yellows. He explains to us the reason he knows the gashes are not serious, is because in high school, he severed a major vein in his wrist. A couple of guys were teasing him, and he told them that the next person to do so would take a trip through a glass door. True to his word, he gashed a vein in his wrist and bled all over, but at least the second antagonizer backed off.

I'm struck by a very real, very disturbing realization. This man is America. This man is voting in November.

But I'm tired of politics. I'm tired of Democrat versus Republican, I'm tired of Bush Versus Kerry, I'm tired of the mudslinging and namecalling and controversy and scandals. I'm just...tired. Its emotionally and psychologically draining to hurt for America. The more I learn, the greater my own disillusionment.