Soapbox

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.

There's an old expression: 
    Never under-estimate the ability of the Democratic party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

   Well it's about to happen again. But this time what's at stake is not just the rise or fall of a political party. Because of the candidates running on the Republican ticket this year, a defeat could really be a defeat for millions of people: education standards subsumed by religious dogma, higher education unattainable for all but the most wealthy, abandonment of our infrastructure, institutionalized persecution of minorities, turning away from perfectly viable clean energy in favor of dirty fuels, letting our last chance to mitigate the global warming disaster slip away… maybe even world war.
   And democrats are sniping at each other.

   When George Bush was elected (selected) I was disappointed but I said "How bad can it be? Some bad policies will get enacted, but tides tend to go out and come back in. We'll survive."
   And there was an economic melt-down, a roll-back of the clean air and water standards that were finally making a difference, narrowing of reproductive rights, the validation of "faith-based science"… and oh yeah: the war.
   The war that cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, tens of thousands injured and traumatized, and destabilized an already volatile region and directly contributed to the ongoing disaster that is the Middle east: Syria, ISIS and the collapse of the once proud, educated nation of Iraq into a heap of burning rubble.

   Then the tide began to turn and Obama was elected. Despite a congress that declared that their primary job from day 1 would be to deny him a second term by whatever means necessary, he dragged the nation into a slow, wide turn back the other way. Despite  daily calls for drug testing poor people and making children work in exchange for a free lunch and turning victim-blaming into a lofty moral perch: despite people who cheered at the idea of letting people die of treatable conditions if their boss doesn't want to give them health insurance… changes were made. Some small but splashy- some quietly splendid.
   It's far from perfect. Things still aren't great. When faced with only hard choices, bad compromises were made.
   But while a really loud, entitled minority continue to scream that they are being oppressed every time they simply aren't allowed to make other people live their way, overall the attitude of the nation has turned toward progress, toward negotiation over confrontation.
Toward tolerance and common sense.

   And now another election has come. This has been called Silly season, but silly is too benign a word for what is going on.
   The Republican candidates, by and large, consist of idiots, bullies and the crinimally insane. They validate every angry, hateful, exclusionary resentment that people frightened of change can harbor. Religous concentration camps? Just the suggestion takes the breath away.
   The democrats have 2 candidates with a lot of experience and strong, forward-looking ideas. Great!
    The devil is in the details.

   I have a candidate that I prefer and plan to vote for, but who it is doesn't really matter. Because I-  a political junkie, don't feel like I can talk about either candidate on social media. It's like jumping in the middle of a family feud- a really nast one.
   A large portion of the democrats have formed a circular firing squad and have begun blasting.
   I can't even stand to scroll my Facebook wall because of the near constant barrage of bitter, accusatory, locked-and-loaded sniping going on from both sides.
   I long ago learned not to try to push back against any of the extreme (and often inaccurate or thoroughly debunked) postings, to suggest a more reasonable (fact-based) interpretation. I know I will be jumped on and accused of being blind, of being ill-informed, of not caring about Issue X.
   And now I cannot even join in a conversation on a reasonable post by a reasonable friend without *their* friends going on the attack-  "Oh trust me- the other side is the one doing this!", "typical corporatist defender"  "You must be a troll!"
   This candidate once said this! Yeah- well that candidate has a supporter who said that! She took money from them! He voted against that!

   Sheesh. Can we just agree that both candidate have strengths and weaknesses, and that we, with our different outlooks, have different priorities in what we are willing to overlook? Can we respect that other people probably have read and considered the same issues,and respect their decision?
    No. We can't. Charges and counter-charges– she rigged the system! He keeps lying abouut who supports him! How can you not see it?!? Here's a hint: if someone makes a request to tone down the general incivility out there and you counter with I'm happy to get along- it's the other candidate whose supporters are out of bounds but what can you expect from people that support him/her…  then yeah, you are exactly who they were talking about.
.  
   It's World War Bernillary out there, and I can't stand it. Now I don't even read anything that anyone posts about either candidate– I see "Bernie Sanders" or "Hillary Clinton" and I just scroll on past. Honestly, I move away even faster than I do with the bizarre "Type Amen and god will bless you with money!' religious posts, because commenting, or even investing the energy to read it is just as useless.

   I want to shake people. I want to make them understand: it's not just "a democrat in the White House" we're talking about in 2016. We're talking about the Supreme Court, and all the ways they can harm- or help America. It's a possible rollback on freedom of speech, of religion, and of the basic idea that a government by the people and for the people should help take care of the people. 
   SO much is at stake, damnit, and half of the progressive population is alienating the other half, and both sides are aliienating the moderates. The majority of America wants to move forward, and if we just walk together we can continue this imperfect, erratic but important progress we have begun.
   Or not. Or fucking not. We can remain strident and inflexible. We can keep talking about write-ins and third party runs to keep your  precious damn ideology pure and unsullied from condoning his lack of a coherant plan here or her hawkish friends there. We can attack and destroy both candidates before the Republicans even turn their sights on them. 
    I hope that zealots purity gives you comfort in the long days ahead, so that when President Trump or President Cruz plunges us into another dark ages, as climate-driven storms sweep the globe, the sniping, uncompromising, my-way-or-the-highway democrats can look around proudly and say 
   "Hey, WE built that!"