I was expecting the blast of democracy breaking to be loud…
This past year, the headlines have risen around me like brittle stalks—towering, broken, casting shadows I could not escape. Each morning’s news felt like another row of corn, dense and tangled, where every step threatened to flush out some new eruption: scandal, indictment, protest, rumor. The noise startled me as much as those pheasants once did, and I braced for the blast that might follow.
All I wanted was to hide. I did not want to take that next step into the uneven ground and the uncertainty that lay ahead.
I looked around for companions—brothers, cousins, fellow citizens—and saw that they too were lost. Together, we were all alone, struggling in the tangled maze of overgrown coverage and darkening shadows. The voices I heard were distant, distorted, echoing through the rows of rhetoric. I angled toward what I thought was the edge of clarity, only to find another “bird” erupting, another headline flying straight at me. I froze, unsure which way to move, terrified of triggering more chaos.
This year has felt like that Nebraska cornfield: a prison of broken stalks, shadows lengthening, footing uneven. Fear rose in my throat, not from pheasants this time, but from the relentless uncertainty of a nation staggering through its own harvest of division.
And when I finally stumbled out of the maze, I found the leaders, the pundits, the power brokers—sitting comfortably at the roadside, sipping their bottles of Coca-Cola, telling me, “There are no pheasants in this field today.”
Yet I had seen them. I had felt them. And I knew the chaos was real.
Fear and loathing in America exists today not only from the pending loss of freedom and democracy, but from the PTSD-like syndrome caused by the unceasing blasts of news from every sector of our lives. Each flight of a bird out of the cornfield explodes against our soul, jarring any sense of normalcy and calm from our grip.
This year we have all suffered—and to what end?