Samain Healing Moon
Just a quick note about election day. I’m holding my psychic breath, not giving in to watching returns, following exit polls. I’ve peeked a bit on the NYT and Real Clear Politics, but when I feel myself drawn in, I move on. Perhaps it’s a very mild from of post-traumatic stress. Not the disorder, but a real aversive conditioning based on 2016. My understanding of American politics betrayed me that day. And the reality and depth of that betrayal has morphed into the lived reality of Trump’s awful Presidency. So, a trauma based stress reinforced daily in ways I still cannot believe.
Politics in this two year time frame have become repugnant to me. I consider myself clear eyed about the nature of politics. It was, ante-Trump, neither wholly good nor wholly evil. It was human, rooted in hopes and ideals, greed and self-interest. It was malleable. Politics was a way of sorting through our public dreams, deciding which ones to nourish, which ones to kill off.
Vietnam cured me of any illusions about the essential decency of politics, but it did not leave me jaundiced. Instead I felt the Vietnam protests and the counter-culture of that era made a real difference. No, not in a straight line from hopes to policies, but in the way American life took notice of new ways of thinking about war and its justification, about gender, about careers, music, art.
Of course there was always the KKK. The Minutemen. The Posse Comitatus. Waco. Ruby Ridge. But they were fringe actors, limning the boundaries of decency by their cross burnings, cult indoctrination, creation of strange understandings of the law. Now these fringe actors have moved center stage. Their abhorrent doctrines have currency, no longer defining boundaries decent folk will not cross, but helping define policy emanating from the White House. Build that wall. Send troops to “defend” America against poor people fleeing their homes, families with children just hoping to live out their days in peace. Give aid to our enemies and the finger to our allies. This is way, way beyond anything I ever imagined.
What will I do if it’s not repudiated at the polls today? I really don’t know. Perhaps retreat into isolation, even though the idea would close off a long dedication to social change. Perhaps recommit to some kind of radical vision. Don’t know. And in not knowing I do not know myself, do not know the one who feels that way. That scares me, BTW.
Wanted to get this down before the results finally roll in. Where I am now.
“While laying over in the Detroit airport today I saw a fellow wearing a T-shirt with a caricature of an alien on it with the text: “Please don’t take me to your leader” ” Friend Tom Crane
My gut tells me that if a blue wave sweeps the country, perhaps especially if it’s a tsunami, we’ll have an even more divided nation afterward. I read an essay that suggested a win by the Democrats, taking the House back for example, might help Trump in 2020. Gag.
The last years of my third phase will, it seems, be lived in a world riven by the politics of fear and baked by a climate heated by our own stupidity. Not exactly a rosy picture. And, not one that can be ignored. In one sense our generation, the oft derided baby boom, is now a deposit of memory, memory of a time when politics, while far from perfect, were not ruled by disinformation and a heightened sense that the other was about to steal your job and your life.