A Flood of Relief & the Power of Hope

This time around, I purposefully kept a low profile throughout the contentious 2024 election cycle. Of course, I prayed and I voted but that was about the extent of my engagement. On Tuesday, November 5th, the night of the election, we ate a quiet dinner at home, spent the evening reading, and as an afterthought, turned on Fox News for about 15 minutes, and then went to bed.

One of the great disciplines to come out of the past four years has been the ability to hold space for uncertainty in absolute peace. Beyond expecting the election to be extremely tight, I had no other expectations. The surprise and relief I felt the next morning upon learning of Trump’s sweeping victory was immense.

As I was out running errands around mid morning I found myself wheeling my 4-Runner into the parking lot of a local Waffle House. Sliding into a booth, I wondered what on earth I was doing there. It had been years since I’d eaten at a Waffle House. Somehow, intuitively, I felt a need to connect with everyday Americans, regular blue-collar Americans, those working class folks that Biden’s economics had hurt the most.

The blue-jeaned, Carhart-jacketed man sitting at the dining bar with his faded baseball cap on might have been a trucker, or maybe a construction worker. The black cook frying bacon and eggs and serving them up with an order of hash browns probably had a young family depending on his income. Behind every waitress serving hot coffee and getting hot plates of food out to people were countless stories of families, children and grandchildren, and struggles to pay the bills and make ends meet. I watched the steady rhythm of activity with compassion and the hope of relief for us all.

Then, suddenly, I knew exactly why I had been drawn there. As clear as day I saw him. My father, seated across the booth from me, and it startled me. Especially since he had passed out of this world sixteen years ago. Waffle House had been his favorite place to eat breakfast. And, he fit in there. He was a man’s man, a no-nonsense veteran, and a Civil Service retiree who lived simply and carefully on his Social Security and retirement benefits in his later widowed years. He could eat breakfast for less than $12 at Waffle House.

Feeling the sweetness of his presence brought a lump in my throat and stung behind my eyes. Astonished, I realized something in that moment that I had not known before. Just as the Biden administration had disenfranchised the common, hard-working American citizen, it had also disenfranchised and degraded my father’s many years of service to this country, first in the Air Force and later in the Civil Service as a GS-12.

Much of my childhood had been spent living on multiple Army bases on continents around the world. Except for his earlier stint as a young man in the Air Force during WWII, my father was not directly in the military but in his later years, he was attached to the Army through the Civil Service, in support of the military. We grew up highly patriotic, proud to be Americans. I was proud of my father, of his work on the airfields keeping the Huey’s and the Blackhawk helicopters in tip-top flying shape. We were the United States of America and he was a hero of the World’s greatest peace-keeping force. We were the good guys, keeping the world safe, after all. We were part of the Great Experiment in Liberty. We were the City on the Hill. A beacon of light and hope to the World.

At least, that is what I grew up believing.

That illusion was shattered in 2020 at the beginning of the Great Reset that took place in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic debacle. For me, breaking out of the Matrix was extremely painful, but absolutely necessary. The world simply did not operate the way I thought it did. Because of the corruption of Deep State actors and globalists with nefarious agendas, the United States military was no longer serving a humanitarian role around the world. Instead, we had become the Oppressor, conducting illegal regime changes in other countries, putting them in a debt trap, and stealing their national resources under privatization schemes enriching the Military Industrial Complex.

As the layers of corruption were pulled back, my horror grew with each new revelation of criminal bureaucracy. On top of that there were the years where Biden & Co. purposefully gutted the military of its true patriots and treated our nation’s veterans with dreadful disdain.

The years of systematic controlled demolition of the United States, the lawlessness and utter contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the attempts to demonize America and unmoor us from our historical and religious underpinnings, to tear down and destroy the principles that exist in the very DNA of this country, the concerted effort to social engineer and reorganize society into a globalized New World Order has taken its toll.

The American citizen’s trust in mainstream institutions has been shattered. The trust that corporations, the media, the military, the universities, the medical community, and the courts depend upon has simply evaporated for a significant percentage of the American population. And, not just for me.

The overwhelming results of last week’s national election make a loud statement that can be, and has been, heard around the world: A huge majority of American citizens DO NOT want to “imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been” in the ways that past administrations have tried to foist it down the throats of unwilling and marginalized citizens.

Are we in dire need of and can we benefit from genuine reform in this country? Absolutely, yes. There is a lot of work to be done, a lot of rubble to be removed, a lot of rebuilding to happen. But, it will not be done by human ingenuity and strength alone. I am not among the cadre that believe that DJT is the “savior” of America. . .but that thought is for another day. For now, back to my original story. . .

Somewhere along the muddled way, my pride in the goodness of America had turned to shame. Had my father’s legacy, and many others like his, actually been in vain?

Until that moment, sitting alone in a booth at Waffle House, I had been unaware that such things had been stirring deep in my spirit. But suddenly, they poured forth unbidden in the deluge of relief and hope that welled up from within the depths of my being. It seems as if we have been gifted a short window of time, a reprieve from the evil abounding against our country, a few years to turn things around, an opportunity to repent, to turn 180 degrees in a different direction.

What will we do with the great opportunity we have been given? That remains to be seen but I am incredibly hopeful for the future.

But, today is Veteran’s Day and I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to every veteran, everywhere, that has served this country selflessly in days past. Your service has not been in vain. We have good reason to hope forward from here. Change is coming. The American people are a hardy, resilient lot and it seems that we have found our identity, our voice again. We have found within us the seed, the collective will, to become the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave once again.

And to my father, James Edward Cross, I pay a tribute from the heart. You are my hero. I acknowledge that though you were an imperfect man in your lifetime, you were also an honorable man, a loving man, a good father. The lengths that you went to in order to protect your daughters is legendary, even if you were unable to articulate and explain your actions at the time. I respect your valor, your courage. I salute you in every way possible. I love you always and I am proud to be your daughter. Thank you. Rest in peace.