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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