Soapbox

It's hard to make myself write it.
It's hard to verbalize the feelings~ dread, anxiety, despair.
I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing my fears:
   Here is the box where I keep my worries about Steve and Katie
   Here is where I keep worries about Mom's health
   Here is where I keep my fears about the breakdown of civilization, environmental collapse, global apocalypse.

So to open the box and peek in adds another fear- that the tiger will come roaring out and consume me. But on this last day of the year 2016, when so many of us came to realize that we can't pretend it hasn't all gone to shit, I return to the habit I pushed away because it was getting too close to the bone, and I write.

I read something on a friend's Facebook post today that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. She said that if we are honest, the world has always been a shitty place for most of the human population. It has always been a life of misery and desperation for tens of millions of people.
It's just our entitled position of being white and middle or upper class that has allowed us to see it as something different.

We think that human existence is good and full of compassion and kindness and love- because for us, it mostly has been. Oh houses burn down and people we love die, but from our position as apex predator in THE first-world nation, those are bumps in the road. And we see the parts of it that are obviously not kind and good: war-torn Syria and ebola-ravaged Africa and the authoritarian hell of North Koreas and the slums of rio de Janeiro as abberrations but really, for most of humanity, that's the norm.
They suffer. They worry every day about what they will eat, where they will find clean water. They give birth to children wondering if they will live to grow up and if they do, what pain they will suffer.  Diseases ravage them that we cannot concieve of. They exist for a month on the resources that we use  in a day. 
We think we are good world citizens "doing our part" if we recycle and try to fix something instead of throwing it away and buying a new one, when millions of people around the world may never see a new thing in their llives  unless they make it for themselves.

We have no idea.

But we might. Or our kids, or grandchildren will.

It's weird to think that this may one day be thought of as the Golden Age, before it all fell apart to the point where we could no longer pretend it wasn't falling apart.
Donald Trump isn't going to be the cause. Probably just the catalyst. Already he has a good chunk of the American middle class losing sleep, starting to see the truth behind the curtain that we've been able to use to hide our view of what is coming.
What WE are doing, to ourselves and our kids and our planet. 
Remove the incredible and pants-wettingly terrifying threat he poses to Amerian democracy, our economy, our environment and world peace and the human race is STILL in for a nasty wake-up call real soon.

We are killing ourselves.
We have damaged the oceans- possibly to the point of no return- but still Red Lobster has their "Endless Shrimp" sales. As if anything is ever endless. The vast, uncharted deep, teeming with so much life- and though the body is still twitching, we've killed it. 
We are destroying the environment on which we and much of life depends- not because we have no ability to deal with global warming, but because we care more about the One Day Sale at Macy's than giving up anything- ANYTHING- to protect the planet. We'd rather give up logic and reason and deny science than give up our air conditioners and gas-guzzlers and disposable economy.

Our nuclear boogeyman, that human-built doomsday machine, was never totally disassembled, but at least we seemed to have all recognized that it needs to be. The biggest danger was from small, desperate madmen past careing that to set off a 'dirty bomb' would harm them and theirs more than it would us.
Now we have Donad Trump saying that a nuclear arms race would be a GOOD thing, and the very people who, a decade or even a year ago would have said "More nukes will make us safer? Are you inSANE?" are cheering him on because…

Because… I don't know. 
What blinds a person so much that they will abandon all reason, will look away from the truths before them and embrace chaos and apocalypse. To accept in someone who is "one of them" the very things that they curse and revile in others? To put a sick ideology above the entire world?
Fuck you I'm American/white/christian/straight/rural/angry/entitled. I grew up thinking that the sun revolves around me, and I will embrace any ideology, no matter how twisted, selfish, violent or self-destructive that protects that world-view for another 5 minutes. And if I want to destroy this stinkin planet to do that well no Jew/liberal/Mexican/Muslim/scientist/tree-hugger is gonna tell me no. GOD thinks like me and to hell with the rest of you weirdos! My tribe and nobody else!

It's like we're on the Titanic and the iceberg is about to strike. It's right there outside the stateroom windows, big as death!
And when we tried to steer away- they passed a law saying we aren't allowed to steer any more. When we begged them to steer away, showed them pictures of the iceberg we were about to smash on- they said the pictures were obviously fake and asked why we liberals keep plotting to ruin their cruise? 
  And if the water IS coming in down below and the boat is tipping a little, it's all the fault of those immigrants and brown people , atheists and Muslims we insisted on letting in the steerage compartment, so maybe if we just kicked them out the boat would right itself just fine. And when we shout to get out the boats they say it's all a liberal plot to waste their tax money convincing the cruise line to buy more lifeboats and anyway, the top half of the boat is still nice and dry… the top third of the boat is… this deck they're on… their shoes are only a little bit wet.

and I confess that I am tired. I've been running around with my hair on fire for a while now, and all I'm getting is a singed scalp. I confess that I avoid the news now. The normalization of racism and homophobia and ethnocentrism and nuclear belligerance has exhausted me.
I just can't stand to hear the Titanic News Network talking about suffleboard on the Leto deck when there's water coming in, for fuck's sake! 

So ring out the wold, ring in the new. I expect for us privileged white middle class Americans life will go on pretty much the same for a while. More of us won't be able to afford medical care, fewer of our kids will go to college, our homes will start to lose value as fewer people can afford to buy one. And unemployment will creep up and up despite Trump's magical promises to win at jobs! 
Life as a female is going to more dicey, as rape becomes "locker room antics" and "Women really ought to stay home with their kids where they belong" becomes an accepted thing for a man to say to an educated, qualified woman applying for a job.

Then again, maybe Donald Trump will tweet us into World War 3 by February and the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
And you have to admit that, with a few exceptions, if we as a race are stupid enough to do this to ourselves… perhaps we deserve what's coming.
 

Mom woke completely around 3 AM. She had been restless and apparently fussed with her heart monitor leads to the point that she pulled one of the patches completely off, which sent the nurse in to turn on the light and re-attach it.

I had been dozing off an on in a reclining chair in her room. Having been to this rodeo before, I brought my ipod with me and had music playing so that every beep and chime of her monitor, clunk of a gurney in the hall and restless movement of my mother wouldn't wake me up. It had helped me get a little sleep- but now I was up and so was she.
After the nurse left Mom went back to tossing and turning. I worried that, uncomfortable and unhappy to be back in the hospital again, she wouldn't get back to the sleep she needed. 
   "Mom, would you like to listen to some music?" I asked and walked over to her bed. I scrolled quickly down the list of artists and picked a CD by Jim Malcolm. "This is the guy we toured Scotland with" I said and put the earbuds gently in her ears.

She rolled over and lay quietly, listening to the end while I sat in the chair and tried really hard not to stare obsessively at her heart monitor readings. I hope I never have to have a heart monitor on. The anxiety of worrying that there is something wrong with my heart– that it's too fast or too slow or the T-waves are wrong or something– would for sure make my heart rate go nuts. 

   When I realized the CD was over I got up and scrolled through the list on the iPod again.
   "Oh hey, you might like this one" I said and started it up.
   "This is you, isn't it?" she said with a smile.
I was playing the recording that with my friends Byron and Bill I had made some years ago for our pastor. We called it Come to the Quiet" and it was hymns and other spiritual songs that we found tranquil and uplifting.

I sat back in my chair and tried to quiet my mind to see if I could get a little sleep. Don't worry about her respirations! I chided myself sternly. I was just getting relaxed when I heard a strange sound from the bed. Was she- moaning? Oh no- is something wrong? I sat forward and listened carefully and realized that no- she was… humming.
    "There is a balm… in Gilead…. to make the wounded whole"
Quietly, and a little out of tune (the way you are with ear buds in)  she began to sing along with the recording. She didn't hear me, but I sang with her, because it's something I have always loved to do.
    "Oh that was lovely" she said and smiling, listened to the end. When I started it again with  a CD of a female folk group with wonderful harmonies, she went to sleep almost immediately, and slept deeply.

  So maybe that balm was working.

Yeah, I'm tired of bitching and writing letters and signing petitions.
Yeah, it's tempting to just shrug and say "You can't fight Trump Tower" and stop trying to swim upstream.
America is going to change. By next Christmas, while the beer commercials and traffic snarls will look the same, at it's core, America will not be the same country it has been in my lifetime. It would be easier to just accept that, deal with it and move on.
Here's why I don't.