Oddly it isn’t the loss of civil rights that bothers me, or the rise in hate crimes, or that we seem to like each other far less.

It isn’t disturbing really that “American” doesn’t mean a singular group of people anymore.  But what I notice most is in the morning when we do the Pledge of Allegiance in our school the feeling is different.  I still do it of course because I am a teacher and I have to.  But I don’t believe it, I don’t mean it, and that wonderful sense of the nobility of being an American is gone.

We are perhaps the same country, but now we seem like everyone else.  We are just another democracy.  An amoral thug restrained by nothing and driven by avarice.