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| Photo: Charley Freiberg |
How Can We Talk About It?
One of the only things that keeps me from collapsing into a
ball of tears and horror, nowadays, or flaming up into a screaming mimi, is
writing – writing about what I’m hearing, writing nasty letters to President
Terrible Mistake and to our despicable governor, and writing about the nice,
normal, sometimes magical things about daily life that remind me that life is,
still, worth walking through day by day. I also talk to people, but who I can talk to – and about what –
has become strange and strangulated, first since the election, and now, only
two months in, since the inauguration.
I know who my close allies are, but I need to tread
carefully around patients and students, whose political viewpoints I don’t know
and who don’t need to have politics injected into their relationships with me;
and there are friends, and acquaintances, and some people I love dearly with
whom I can’t discuss the one thing that’s continually on my mind because it’s
continually in our faces. And when I’m with those folks I feel an internal,
uncomfortable tension while I hope, I hope, I hope, they won’t say even a
syllable about our national catastrophe. I’ve wasted many too many hours trying
to prepare a response in case they bring it up: what can I say without screeching
that will make it clear I don’t support the Antichrist and all his evil works
and minions, but not get so ugly we can no longer spend time together? How will
we maintain a relationship if words are exchanged? Should I say my piece, or
simply leave the building? At one point I even wrote out a declaration that I
could hand to the offender, and I still carry it around with me, just in case.
With students I’m in charge, so I can cut off any hints of
political discussion summarily. With patients, I’m also in charge, and I can
say, pretty literally, it sounds like we
shouldn’t have that discussion, and you need to remember who’s in charge of the
sharp needles here – that usually ends the discussion promptly. But what do
I say to friends who have fallen into the tar pit, to friendly neighbors, to
relatives? It’s to these people I believe we have a duty to point out the evil
taking place around us; it’s to these people we have a moral obligation, in
these abnormal times, to counter their acceptance or support of what’s
happening and not allow a hint of agreement to pass between us; it’s to these
people, especially, that we need to be witnesses to the truth. But it’s also
these people who we need to stay in relationship with, and at whom we don’t
want to shout for the next four (pray god it turns out to be less than that,
please, please impeach him soon!) years. It’s to these people we have a stake
and even a moral, ethical, and civic obligation to try to persuade that they’ve
chosen wrongly, and that our reactions are not over-reactions, but reasonable
reactions to the reality of what’s happening to our nation, our neighbors, our
fellow human beings.
And therein lies the tragedy and the personal pain. How -
how – how – can one have an actual
discussion with people who don’t see the darkness that has descended on us, who
don’t think that what is happening is different from any other political
cycle? What does one say to someone who,
when presented with a fact, says, “But
that didn’t happen!” or, “But that’s
no worse than the last Administration did,” or, “But that’s only one fact, how about the alt fact?”?
There seem to be five distinct types of people sharing the
part of the continent we call the US right now. One part is the part that just
doesn’t care about what’s going on politically, and never have; they don’t regularly
follow the news, they don’t vote, they figure that what happens is gonna happen
no matter whether they pay attention or not, and they don’t worry about such
things except generally and rarely – their lives, what happens day to day, is
what interests them. Only slowly, and under extreme circumstances or
circumstances during which they or their loved ones are negatively affected,
might they be moved out of their apathy and into action. Is it worth talking
about what’s going on to these people? It’s probably worth it, from an ethical
point of view, but they’re probably not listening, and they’re likely not to
have a clear idea of what you’re talking about, because they haven’t been
following the news, unless it’s local, and even then - whatever.
A second batch are the truly evil people who are absolutely
enthralled with what’s going on now, hopeful, eager, feeling powerful and
justified: the internet trolls, the white supremacists, the xenophobes, the
racists, people longing for and encouraging anything that speeds the arrival of
the End of Days, fascists, neo-Nazis, and people who purposefully and
consciously do evil whenever there is chaos, as well as some people I think we
can reasonably call psychologically warped – sociopaths of many sorts, and some
who are quite insane. There isn’t much point in even trying to have a
discussion with these folks – they don’t care what you think, they aren’t going
to be persuaded, and they aren’t going to change their minds unless something
startling happens to them, personally, that makes them see the light - maybe if
some god zaps them on their way to Damascus, for example.
They like what’s
happening, they helped make it happen, and they’re currently the people in
power in Washington as well as fringe loonies who are made hopeful by the nasty
direction our leaders are headed. I consider it fair to shout vile things at
them – they don’t listen, it won’t change anything, but it makes me feel better
to express myself fully and freely about what they’re doing.
A third group has shaky ethical standards, and is very happy
to use the confusion our current state of chaos has created to benefit
personally while they can. We are so distracted by other stuff, we aren’t
noticing what injustices and thievery they’re accomplishing under cloak of
darkness. These people are well-informed, skilled at using the system, and
interested only in promoting their own wealth and interests, and a lot of them
– a lot of them - are our elected representatives, and lobbyists. They’ll lie,
switch sides, hide activity, vote in their own best interests, and make the
most of the evil surrounding us until it negatively affects them personally. Some
of them have a low bar below which they won’t go, but their bar is generally
very, very low. They’ll occasionally do something to promote the actual good of
the nation. Are they persuadable? Eh – depends on how much they or their
cronies might personally lose. Amongst these people I include politicians and
citizens whose beliefs about politics and religion balance on the knife edge of
kinda very nutty – but not on every topic, and not all the time, and they aren’t
as purely evil or actually insane as the ghouls in group two – just sometimes.
The fourth is the group that totally gob-smacks me. These
are the people who somehow bought into the fantasy world that Donald Trump and
his gang of ghouls invents. If they’re in the subset that enthusiastically
voted for him, they’re people who lost their shame about the small prejudices
they harbor, their unhappiness about their financial situation, their dismay at
some cultural changes they don’t fully understand or are uncomfortable with,
and allowed the energy and the excessive anger of Trump’s presentation convince
them that what they feel is right, just, reasonable, and morally appropriate.
They bought the lie and let themselves be swept into the maelstrom – they’re
cult followers, and don’t question anything he says or does, no matter what, no
matter what actually happens. If they weren’t ghouls before the primary season,
they became baby ghouls during and remain so after. Another subset may not have
voted for Trump – they didn’t drink the whole glass of drug-infused happy juice,
but many of them somehow couldn’t see that the comparison of faults between
Trump and Hillary wasn’t even a contest: they equated awkward, foolish and self-serving as being equivalent to or worse
than corrupt, vicious and self-serving.
They felt rather than reasoned their way through the election.
I don’t really understand this category – they didn’t wholly
buy into the cult following, but they embraced parts of it, in spite of history
and facts and common sense; and now they’re the ones who say, oh, we need to give him a chance, or, oh, he’s not doing a bad job, let’s just
wait and see. If you point out to them the horrible things that Trump and
his ghouls have done, said, or plan to do, they look at you like you’re insane,
and respond, well, that only happened
once; or, he must have a good reason
for it; or even, but that never happened.
These people are scary because they’ve lost their moral compass, or their
ability to reason; they don’t hear, or remember, the things that should make
them uncomfortable, or they choose not to give them much weight. These people are
like lost souls wandering aimlessly through Limbo, people who aren’t inherently
bad people, and who might otherwise be very good and kind people, but who have
lost the discrimination to recognize evil when they see it.
Another subset of this group are people who have become
inflamed by the energy of the evil beings among us, and who have become vocal
and psychically wrought-up in their enthusiastic acceptance of what appears to
me to be a sudden realization they think they’ve had about Important Stuff.
They think they’ve had an Insight: of course
there are alternative facts, of course the
media of record is illegitimate and lies to us, of course Obama was a disaster of a president and did sneaky things
trying to destroy Trump, of course there
are hoards of terrorists trying to enter the country and more hoards of dangerous
illegal immigrants already here, of course
the whole Russian connection is a lie. This sub-group seems to latch onto
whatever meme the ghouls are throwing out at us and it seems to me that at
least part of what fuels them is that they’re determined not to be too
old-fashioned or ignorant to be left behind. Thought and discrimination seem to
have deserted this group, and it’s this group, in particular, that enabled the
Antichrist to rise and flourish.
There are characteristics shared by folks in group four, all
through the sub-groups. They aren’t people who are necessarily uneducated - some
are very well-educated; but they all seem to get their information from non-traditional
“media,” Fox News being the least
bizarre source. They also – or maybe consequently – don’t think things through,
instead accepting whatever’s presented by these not-really-journalists as fact,
even when just a little examination would prove the fallacy. As a consequence,
these folks have become enthusiastic about embracing political attitudes or
actions that will work against their best interests – and they seem to have not
a clue that this is so. They also have an insane, and enduring, confidence that
the people currently in charge won’t do anything that’s bad for us – the common
people – or the nation. And, finally, they believe that we, who are in the
fifth group, are being ridiculously alarmist – they don’t see any danger in the
current state of the national State.
This group is the group we should be able to have a discussion with, with whom we should be able to find at least a
partial meeting of the minds, who we should
be able to persuade or inform back to reason and cooperation. But how do we
do it? How do we have a discussion with people who appear to have lost their
minds, and who are just as certain that we have lost ours? Where does one begin
a discussion when my facts aren’t the same facts that the person I’m trying to
have a discussion with knows? How do you talk to someone who seems to be living
in an alternative universe, so our definitions of reality and evil and ethics
are totally at odds?
The fifth group is the group I inhabit. This group, too, has
subsets – there are the folks who are so devastated by the current state of
affairs that they can’t bring themselves to think about it or talk about it and
are pretty much living with their blankets pulled up over their heads and
hoping that day will dawn and the monsters will magically have disappeared.
Another subset fears for their lives and well-being now the ghouls have
achieved ascendancy – and these people are actually, in real-time, day to day,
experiencing threats and sometimes violence, and have become afraid for their
well-being with good reason. People experiencing actualized violence or who are
living in continual fear that they will, or could, become a victim momentarily,
don’t always act in reasoned and deliberate ways. We’ve heard about some of
these folks, who are escaping on foot to Canada and winding up frost-bitten,
ill, or dead.
Another subset is horrified by what has happened and is
happening but has decided that talking about it is useless and acting on it is
a waste of time, or if not a complete waste of time, feel that giving voice to
their reaction will burn them too badly to recover; another subset can only
speak angrily and endlessly about it and have lost their joy in life. Yet another
subset feels they have to bear witness in some fairly continuous public way:
protesters, writers, journalists, actors, politicians, every day folk, famous
folk - lest we inadvertently become enablers of evil.
A thing I find interesting is that the ascendancy of the
Antichrist and his legion of ghouls has thrown
together many of us who might have been political enemies, in prior
political Administrations. Good people, Conservatives and Libertarians and
Liberals and Socialists and others, are united in their horror. We, at least,
are talking to each other, maybe more than we have in many years. If we manage
to pull out of this, it may be what saves us as a nation.
One of the things we’re talking to each other about, in
hushed voices, and reluctantly, for fear that voicing it might make it true, is
our observation that what’s happening – what the Administration is doing and
saying, and not doing and saying; and what the Legislature is ignoring or
supporting or stalling or not doing – looks an awful lot like what happens,
what has happened, in countries in which a deteriorating system has led to a
coup. We worry about what might cause the military and other national services –
ignored, insulted, and reviled by Trump – to decide he’s too dangerous to be
left in place, and that the Legislature is too timid or corrupt to deal with
him, so they take it into their own hands before worse damage is done. And we
worry about what might happen afterwards. A coup that restores what was once
normal in this country might not be a terrible thing in practical terms though
ever a terrible thing in circumstance; a coup that leads to a forced restructuring
could be the end of life as we know it. And so we pray: impeach him; impeach
him quickly; impeach him before he does something that causes someone else to stop
him. Please.
Another thing we talk about, also in hushed voices, and
which we fear could lead to a coup, is whether this government, this
out-of-control President or one of his minions acting in his name, will do or
say something that will start World War III. How many of our allies can he
insult or piss off, and how many times can he get away with it, before we’ve
lost all our friends? How close to causing irreparable damage is too close? How
about threatening the madman who rules North Korea? Is that too close? Our own
madman holds the keys to our nuclear warheads, and doesn’t take advice or ask
advice from anyone with a calm and collected and historical view of world
relations. He’s surrounded himself with people who have said, aloud, that this
Administration is their opportunity to change the world order. How much closer
can he get and we can still feel reasonably safe?
I no longer feel safe. I haven’t, for two months now. I look
back at all the past Presidents I didn’t like, and I think – I’d take any of
them over this one. Any of them.
I’d feel safer if more of my fellow citizens were feeling as
horrified as I am. I’d feel safer if I knew more of us were regularly
contacting our legislators. I’d feel safer if the people in that fourth group I
described above would suddenly have the glamour drop from their eyes, and they
woke up and said, Wait a minute. This isn’t
normal. This isn’t right. This isn’t what we really want.
I’d feel better if I could have a discussion, and not a
shouting match, with those people. But as much as I’d like to start a
discussion with some of them, I have no idea how to do it. I think we need to
keep vigil, be witnesses, speak up when evil acts are being done and when evil
words are being spoken, and hope that our loved ones and neighbors come to
their senses sooner than later. But if they don’t – and if we’re present when
they talk about it – I think we must gird our loins and speak the truth. To do
any less is to enable evil.
We’ve been there too many times in our nation’s
history, and we must strive to keep it from happening again, because this time
it could be the literal end.
- Here’s a new Story from the Heart of Darkness: someone who read Gun Gal told me a scary story her cousin told her. This being the era of scary stories, stories we don’t want to hear but need to hear, I’m sharing:
Cousin lives down south somewhere, maybe North or South
Carolina, I don’t remember the state and it doesn’t really matter – it could
have happened here just as easily. One day she was walking her (very
well-behaved) dog near her house, and a jogger came up behind them. As all dogs
will do, hers began barking as the jogger came from behind them, but not
lunging or trying to chase the jogger. The jogger stopped, pulled a gun out of
her concealed holster, aimed it at the dog, and said, “Shut your dog up or I’ll
blow it away.”
As you can imagine, all joy in dog-walking has gone out of Cousin’s
life. She’s scared to death to walk her dog locally. I don’t know whether she
called the police, but I’m guessing not, because how do you identify an unknown
jogger? “Sweaty female person in jogging clothes coming from I don’t know where
and headed to I don’t know where threatened me with a gun.” The cops wouldn’t
have been able to do anything.
Probably a nice neighborhood before the gun trolls moved in.
I am one Witness. Written for the blog.
