Uncharted Waters

Yesterday as I looked out onto the hills and sea beyond, all the craziness and sadness receded, and for a moment, this was the only reality I knew. So many worlds within the world, I thought. So many moments happening within this moment.

I've been sick. And I'm also tired and angry and overloaded with input, trying to take what action I can, and at the same time feeling that the game is rigged against us. How is it possible that so many voters would relinquish precious freedoms and place their trust in people who are this brazenly sinister, corrupt, and dangerous?

They're misguidedly gleeful about it even now. But my role is not to convince or convert or even any longer try to understand those others. I've had enough exasperating encounters to realize that we are not confronting reason, but rather a kind of brainwashing, a mind set calcified in bitterness and vindictiveness. (Maybe underneath that there is fear, frustration, and a troubling kind of ignorance, but this cannot be our focus now.) No--instead of wasting time and energy there, we need to look to ourselves and our allies, and how we got here, and how to turn it around. We cannot lose momentum, because this is unfolding with stunning aggression and speed.

I've been wondering lately, as I watch the shameful shenanigans of the Republicans, led by people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell: whatever happened to moral courage? With rare and tentative exceptions, they all seem spinelessly willing to go along with the naked insanity and corruption of the emperor and his puppet masters as long as they believe they can shove through their reactionary agenda (callously knocking people off their health care coverage, removing ethics accountability and environmental protections, diluting crucial barriers between state and religion...I could go on.) At what point will the transgressions become sufficiently abhorrent that even members of the GOP will stand up in brave, unequivocal opposition? And maybe it's time to demand a mental health evaluation of this Frankenstein they've helped create. (I'm not kidding.)

My friend Jeanne shared a memory in an email yesterday:

"I am reminded this morning of the day many years ago when my Republican father became a Democrat. He announced his new perspective with shaving soap on half his face, having come from his morning absolutions half-done, the radio announcement of the Kent State killings of 1970 still playing in the bathroom. He said he could no longer belong to a party that could massacre its own children. I will never forget the look on his face, but most of all the tears in his eyes. I had never seen that before. There will be other good people now who will do the same, finally understanding what is happening here."

I just hope it can happen fast enough. I'm trying to balance alarm and clarity.

Last night I dreamed about my dear brother Eddie, now gone nearly twenty-five years. He tried so hard to have the simple things so many take for granted. He was intelligent and kind, but born with the time bomb of a kidney disease that rendered him at the mercy of strangers, medical technology, constraints, complexities, and vicissitudes of funding far beyond his control. He missed out on so much, and he died at forty-five, but you know what? Life never turned him mean.It's the meanness I hate, most of all, in what I am seeing.

But I'll close with these words by Edna St. Vincent Millay, because I still believe in poetry and hope and the better angels: