It has come to the point where I cannot decode what I understand or maybe my last shreds of idealistic innocence and blindness are being swept away. Maybe I am just another damn fool sleeper awakening.
Since Plymouth and Jamestown, the US has always been a collection of accomplished killers and economic pirates. For proof of that spend just a few hours thumbing through the history of the Indian Wars, Vietnam, Iraq, the brutal and mostly stupid machinations of the CIA, the depredations of slavery and Jum Crow and the titanic, ongoing crimes of corporations.
But there has also been a wrenchingly slow process forward, one replete with hesitations and retreats, but still a progress toward a more just nation. Over 350,000 Union soldiers fought and died to end slavery and preserve the Union. FDR used the Great Depression to fundamentally reorient the nation toward a fairer and more just political and social polity. Martin Luther King found a way to appeal to the nation’s conscience in helping to bring down Jim Crow and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in concert with President Johnson, whose own childhood poverty spurred him to try to legislatively erase hunger. Over the course of a generation the nation found a way to preserve wilderness, clean up rivers and streams, clean the air, give more people medical coverage.
We could never seem to escape our own hubris though. Vietnam showed that, and the support of dictatorships world wide during the Cold War, and then the awful decision to attack Iraq in 2003 after 9/11 persuaded Bush and Cheney they should try their hand at their own dead end holy war.
Now, in 2020 we have devolved into a nation ruled by a governing Party who believe in a nationalist ideology that is akin to a world populated by a race of Cyclops, a cannibal species who see everything as flat and two-dimensional, a place without nuance and factual, accurate measurement.
I can figure out why a Republican might have beaten Clinton in 2016. She was an arrogant candidate, connected to a husband who’s own lies about and treatment of women were coming back to haunt him, but why Trump, as obvious a political fraud and dope as I have ever seen? And then after 3 years of his endless lies, crimes and assaults on human kindness and dignity, Trump seems poised to win again, especially with the economy running so strong and with Sanders the probable nominee, a terrible politician, one more old man grasping for power. Trump and his animals will shred Sanders like a pinata. But still, I’ll work for Sanders if he is nominated. Good Christ, I’ll work for Bloomberg because while they would be awful Presidents, Trump is cholera and four more years of him is a pandemic.
Don DeLillo wrote that “Longing on a large scale makes history,” but I cannot decode what it is we collectively long for.
Maybe there is nothing we long for on a large scale. I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. Maybe we are so fractured, nationally and globally, that such large scale longing has become obsolete. At least in our wired and connected First World way, we are only inhabitants of smaller and smaller geographic, political and consumer niches. Isn’t the great cry of our binge watching, Instagram/Facebook/TikTok nation, “Oh please let us alone here in the dark, safe within our locked up homes?” Maybe that is our collective longing.
Outside those locked up homes, nine children froze to death in Syria in recent weeks in Idlib Province where 900,000 Syrians have run to escape Assad and the Russians. The Chinese continue to hold over 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps. Who knows how the Coronavirus has affected them? Other innumerable terrors are taking place outside our bubble, but there are people fighting in the midst of those terrors for relief, for life, for justice. In spite of every setback or obstacle, we must continue to long for an end to oppression and cruelty and corruption. We have no excuse to turn away from any of it, not unless we choose to go dead at the core, not if we want to keep on being human beings.
