Mourning in America

Collage by JoAnne Spies

It is astounding to me two weeks into this science fiction how much it still feels like a death. At first there was shock, disbelief. Then despair and an icy nightmare dread of the future. More recently, there has been anger and blame. The misdiagnosis, the FBI, white women. Someone must be held responsible. Hypervigilance is called for. If I forget for five minutes while I'm watching a Law and Order re-run, I am plagued by guilt. How could I forget? How could I forget? I have betrayed my country. I am a cheap date. The campaign was a long, protracted illness complete with remissions and periods of false hope. The election itself was a massive cardiac event, a failure of the heart. Now, in the aftermath, we are suffering from complicated grief.

Complexity will hunt you down if you give it the slightest opening. It will keep you awake at night and deliver florid dreams of your own complicity if you are fortunate enough to sleep at all. In the wee hours of November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, camps were already forming on the left. Some turned their rage on the power brokers at the DNC. Others railed against their own children who voted Green or not at all. People of color, Muslims, and immigrants woke up to a new and terrifying world. There is more than enough reason to fear the president-elect and his white supremacist minions. Those of us less likely to be immediate cannon fodder have a commanding moral obligation to join forces with the most vulnerable and stand up to emerging racist rhetoric and policy threats. Desmond Tutu said "if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you've chosen the side of the oppressor." No means no. Never Again means Never Again.

We arrived at this moment after months of unrelieved stress fed by the invidious pollsters. She's up by three. She has an 85% chance of winning. Some algorhithm that claims scientific validity, some mathematical hocus pocus that we are clearly not meant to understand, scanned the horizon and missed half the population. Sixty million people primarily in rural counties and small cities throughout the country voted for the Republican candidate. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic during the campaign "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally." I remember, nostalgically, conversations I had before the election about how we (liberals, progressives, people who were convinced they had the moral high ground) would accommodate the rage and despair of the Trump voters after they were trounced. We had a faint glimmer of the degradation of life in those remote flyover precincts - the abandoned mills, the opiate addiction and what The Nation has since referred to with maximum snark as the "economic anxiety." Note the quotation marks. But we had no idea of the magnitude of the desperation. Now we know.

I'm reminded of a story I once wrote about a woman who is among the mourners at a shiva. She sits and sits, eats cake and more cake, but can't seem to figure out who has died. It's like that now. We don't yet know who or what has died. Is it the First Amendment, the equal protection clause, a snowball's chance in limbo that we'll be able to reverse the onward march of climate change? We're still in the remains-to-be-seen phase, but every day brings us closer to the dark side of the moon. People in northern Florida and western Pennsylvania who voted for him will not get better health benefits. They will not get jobs that pay a living wage. Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics, LGBT people, the disabled and, yes, Jews, will be victimized, while the people in power compete for the biggest pieces of pie like contentious family members at the reading of the will.

We, the survivors, are called to remember the rising tide of hope that carried us during the last administration, especially in the early years. The attempt to provide affordable healthcare, the efforts to regulate the banks, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the spectacle of someone like Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. But to remember accurately without sanding down the rough patches, we will also have to call to mind the endless drone war, the growing horror of income inequality, the expansion of mass incarceration of inconvenient populations. The patient has been ailing for a long time. It is the daunting obligation of our citizenship that we maintain a panoramic awareness of the breadth and depth of the conditions that have led to this moment. We must witness with unwavering attention the hostile takeover of our country by a rightwing cabal that campaigned in a language that we do not speak and the anti-democratic forces that have since been unleashed. There will be a resurrection of the better angels in our wounded country, a renaissance of sanity, but we will have to fight hard for it. We will have to be patient and I am not always a patient person.

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They Can't Take That Away From Me

If you're anything like me, right about now you feel like everything you hold dear is imperiled. After tomorrow, we may be entering a new dispensation in which our president (God forbid) is intimate with both the KKK and the KGB. Your inclination is to focus on those things that give you solace, casting a soft glow on your life, inspiring gratitude and making you think of drinking pernod and listening to Edith Piaf. Writing in the second person gives you just the distance you need to escape the black hole of "it can happen here." So you go the second person route which you have not done since the very first blog post on seventysomething when you couldn't quite believe you were taking the plunge. You considered calling this piece "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things," but mindful that sentimentality is the flip side of violence, you determined that the treacly, alpine Julie Andrews lyric didn't fly. Instead, you went with Gershwin, 1937, Jewish New York, defiance in the face of brown shirts on the move. The following is a list, hardly exhaustive and in no particular order, of some everyday encounters, all virtually free of charge, that belong to you irrespective of the outcome of the election  and that fill you with tranquility, joy and amazement. So there.

Drinking coffee in bed. In the indolence of seventysomething, you don't generally rush out of the house in the morning. You can make a pot of coffee and pour a cup for yourself (black) and one for Frank (with milk). Then, you can get back in bed and read, letting the caffeine work its magic, orbiting other worlds. You can fly to Rome with Jhumpa Lahiri in the pages of In Other Words. Watch the remarkable Jhumpa, raised in Bengali and educated in English, as she surrenders to Italian. You can wander with Rabih Alameddine in Yemen, Egypt and Lebanon and tell him how much you admire his intricate novel, The Angel of History. You are hopelessly infatuated with books like a horny teenager. You can't live without them.

Lemons. You love their astringency, the perfume that floats up from the oil in their peel when it's grated over linguini. Lemons make everything taste better, cod, custard, cocktails. So Mediterranean. You love their color in a blue bowl, definitively yellow as if nothing else, no daffodil, no sundress could compete. The way they offer themselves up off the tree in your sister's backyard in Berkeley. You are grateful to lemons for their simplicity and their versatility, their willingness to make themselves useful.

Walking in Stockbridge. You never get tired of ambling in disbelief down Main Street from north of the library, past the Dutch roofed old town hall, past the gracious Riggs buildings with their charcoal shutters and matte blue doors separating the pain inside from the pain outside, all the way to the cemetery where your friend, Al, a wandering Jew, an interloper, ended up surrounded by legions of church people from old Stockbridge families. Nothing much changes in this town. The trees do what trees are called to do, leafing gracefully in the spring, exploding in cherry blossoms as spring becomes summer, turning pumpkin in autumn, letting go as winter approaches. You feel no need for a different walk. It's less than a mile down and back, but you see something new every day.

Words. English words inhabit your cells in densely populated housing projects. There are so many of them and each one plays different music. You love their roots in the classical languages, connecting you like ancient Facebook friends to Socrates and Virgil. Sometimes, they arrive in steerage or by caravan from the Arab world. Alchemy. Algebra. The history of language defies politics. Eighth graders in Indiana don't know they're engaging with the mathematics of the Arab world when they struggle to solve equations. They don't know that the word ojala, Spanish for hopefully, comes from the Islamic devotion, if Allah wills it. Words are sneaky. They don't carry passports. They vault over the big wall and set up shop. There are some that irritate and some that terrify, but truthfully, you love almost all of them promiscuously.

You will not be deprived of these pleasures no matter how far the armies of the night advance. You have read the history books and you know that the struggle to remain who you are in the face of the monster is crucial to survival. In the cacophony of the moment, you wish to make it clear that you
will not be bludgeoned.

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