🏛️ Where the Hell Am I?
The Republic with Cracks in Its Foundation
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
— W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919
⚡ I Knew It — Cracks in the Foundation
Omgawd — I knew it. There are cracks in the foundation, and the surface will not hold.
Israel is misbehaving, Trump is in China, the government’s shut down — and somehow he’s wiring money to Argentina. Meanwhile, veterans are standing in food lines, SNAP benefits wobble, and Pam Bondi is trending. Prices are “down,” they say — not when I checked my grocery bill.
The President claims he’ll call on his millionaire friends to lend us money, just like J. P. Morgan did in 1907 when the nation teetered on collapse. Apparently they can bankroll a ballroom, but not the kids who need lunch or the air-traffic controllers who keep the skies safe.
And that’s when Yeats starts whispering through the newsfeed: the centre cannot hold.
🏚️ Whatever Happened to the Republic?
Omgawd — where the hell am I?
I thought this was the United States of America — the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Maybe we should start saying that pledge again so Congress, the President, and the three branches of government remember what those words mean.
Did anyone notice it says Republic, not Democracy?
We’ve been cooking with the wrong grease.
A democracy is pure majority rule — fifty-one percent can vote away the rights of the other forty-nine.
A republic is the architecture that prevents that — a system of laws and checks that keep passion from burning down the house.
Democracy is the flame; the Republic is the fireproof design.
But right now, the mortar’s crumbling, and the centre — civic faith, common fact, collective sanity — is coming apart brick by brick.
🕯️ Jefferson’s Common Sense
Thomas Jefferson, for all his contradictions, at least understood spiritual pluralism.
In the Declaration of Independence he wrote that we are “endowed by their Creator” — not the Christian God, but an open invitation to conscience.
That openness was once America’s genius.
It allowed light in. It meant no single creed could monopolize truth.
Now it’s tit-for-tat and tribal, every network its own gospel, every party its own prophet.
The falcon can no longer hear the falconer.
🗞️ Whatever Happened to the Press?
Fox says one thing, CNN another, and truth — that quiet civic virtue — is stranded somewhere in between, waiting for airtime.
Whatever happened to the Walter Cronkites, the Edward R. Murrows, the Dan Rathers — the journalists who treated truth like oxygen, not entertainment?
Freedom of the press was never meant to mean freedom from responsibility.
The Fourth Estate has become a fourth wall, and too many citizens are content to watch the Republic’s collapse as if it were a season finale.
🧭 The Rough Beast at the Door
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” — Yeats
That beast doesn’t slouch anymore — it struts across screens, tweets from podiums, and trades empathy for spectacle.
Yet Yeats also knew that every collapse carries the seed of renewal.
The question is what kind of birth this will be — one of conscience or of cruelty.
Maybe the centre can hold again — if we remember what it was made of:
a bill of rights, not a bill of sale;
a press that questions, not flatters;
citizens who read before they react.
Until then, I’ll keep asking, “Where the hell am I?”
Because the moment we stop asking is the moment the Republic falls silent —
and silence, as Yeats warned, is how the beast gets born.
🕊️ — Kimberly Twain
Twain’s Gazette of the Absurd
🧭 Twainian Compass Rose: When the centre cannot hold, rebuild the foundation — not the echo.
Yes, dangerous times for the Republic.