Back in the day when a strange, wood-pulp-based communication device landed on our doorsteps daily, Americans enjoyed their “funnies.” At least that’s what I called the comics section of the newspaper. I would usually be the one to run out to gather the paper, then open it up and follow the adventures of Charlie Brown, Marmaduke, and Beetle Bailey. And sometimes, if I got ahold of the afternoon paper in Cincinnati, I would read Pogo.

Walt Kelly was a brilliant artist and a barbed wit, and he embued his opossum character Pogo and his animal friends with biting observations to match their lovely woodlands surroundings. Pogo beat Doonesbury to acerbic political commentary status by decades. The strip ran many years, and in 1970, an Earth Day edition gave us what became Pogo’s most well known quote:

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

I recalled that strip the other day when responding to a friend on Facebook. I was commenting about what has happened to America as a country. Today, a thuggishness seems to pervade our country, especially when it comes to dialoguing about ideas. Whereas Pogo was distraught over pollution, we have become people who cannot abide ideas that are different from our own, whether those ideas are polluted or as pristine as a clear, babbling brook.

Here is where we are:

We Americans have become the very people from whom the Founders of our country fled.

When I see American corporations, politicians, and loud, angry citizens wielding their power as a club to beat down anyone who does not bow down to their ideas, then I think back to the Pilgrims, to a bunch of brave men wondering if they would all hang separately if they did not hang togther, and to the reasons this country came into being in the first place.

From what did our forefathers flee? What drove them to pack up, brave a cruel ocean, and come to an unknown land filled with equal measures of uncertainty and freedom? How is it that we no longer recall our own country’s reason for existence? How is it that we have become the oppressive autocrats from whom our forefathers fled to find freedom?

Consider those boldfaced words above. And may God have mercy on the USA.