The Yellow Volkswagen

In college my father proposed to buy me a car upon completing my junior year on the Dean's list. He would buy the car for me but I had to afford everything else it required. I wanted a VW Beetle in butter cream yellow. I thought it was such a unique color. But I suddenly saw them everywhere. As I also begun to see all the expenses of a gift horse (well, Beetle). I was putting myself through college at the time. No student loans then. I had part time jobs on campus and close to campus. I mostly walked everywhere I needed to go. Or took the bus. Albuquerque had a good bus system. 

So as the spring semester inched on I saw more and more yellow Beetles and more and more flaws to my father's generous offer. But I also began to see just how expensive putting myself through college was. How much a toll on my life the jobs took. Not to mention the studying to keep up my grades. All my friends worried about me. I was no longer fun.

 I kept up my grades. I completed my junior year. And I quit college. It would be two miserable years before I would go back to the University of New Mexico and complete my degree. I kidded around that it was all the fault of the Yellow Volkswagen Syndrome (YVS). Until Dad had offered to buy me that car I had not seen all the flaws in my life and my choices. Hell, I was even majoring in the wrong subject, and for all the wrong reasons.

This election is my current YVS. Only this time the myriad cracks suddenly visible are not in my life but in my country. How in Hell did it get this bad without me noticing? Surely 2000 Election was a sign, but I figured the system would self correct. The Tea Party was a warning sign it hadn't. I saw the back peddling on women's issues as minor flaws, but then the minor flaws seemed to be more and more prevalent. Then they were everywhere. The DNC and the RNC picking their two standard bearers revealed the entire spiderweb for cracks and fissures in the Statue of Liberty and the land it represents.

It isn't just our infrastructure which is crumbling. Our Democracy is dust.

After years of working in the building trades I decided the bulldozer was under appreciated as a remodeling tool. Now I see that our country is not just a remodeling job like Trump proposes (Make American Great Again). A Constitutional convention will be too little and too late even if we achieve it. We need a complete and total rebuild. A revolution.

I will vote on Tuesday. I see it changing nothing. Fortunately I am old enough I will probably crumble before the Huns take the walls. Too bad. This seemed like such a great place to make history. But then the fall of the Roman Empire is history.