Stunned since January 6.
The pressure had built from the election up to that point with the monstrous lies too ridiculous and too outrageous to laugh too long.
I honestly don't know if our America will survive. There was so much unfinished work yet to do and now it seems to be in vain.
I can't trust the people who supported the horrible man who caused this. Well, it wasn't just him but all his enablers. Does that include us all? I don't know who all of them are. They are all around and I am brokenhearted.
There are people I greatly love and have even respected who seem to betray me now. The hard truths I have been dealing with in my own brain have been ground into dirt.
Yesterday, I told someone that Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 was an important book from my teen years when I began to own books so I had something to fight for if they ever came to burn them. I went to re-read it and did not find it among my Bradburys. It hasn't been burned, just lent out to a friend or family member's forgetfulness. I ordered a new copy.
This came to me and I put it on Twitter a day or so ago:
Many things we consider rights are privileges not shared by all.
And be grateful to God, but many things we consider blessings are actually privileges.
Be humble.
Heart broken.
I love your blog.
ReplyDeleteYour POV makes me feel less alone.
I've begun wondering recently, after several experiences being betrayed, if those experiences weren't to help me figure out how to recognize betrayal. At first I was pretty mad about that idea, because I feel like there have to be better ways to learn this than personal experience, but then I realized that maybe from having learned the hard way, I could actually get good at this awful skill. Maybe being good at recognizing betrayal might come with the companion skill of being able to recognize trustworthiness. I can only hope.
Also-- I realize this is far out, but bear with me-- but, do you remember how "Victorian-era morality" was sort of the cultural pendulum swinging back from the extreme licentiousness of King George III's kids? And yes, I'm not so naive that I'm completely unaware of Victorian-era hypocrisy, but there really was a societal-level trend towards respecting the law of chastity more. People build stuff into civilization when they see that it is needed. I currently feel more of a sense of hope than I have in a while, because I started feeling alarmed twenty years ago at some of the groundwork laid by the Bush II administration for the situation we are facing with Trump. Valerie Plame-- I apologize if you interpret that situation differently than me-- but that situation made it clear to me that Certain People were beginning to feel free to use their government offices to punish political enemies. The fact that President Trump was so egregious about it that tons of people started to feel uncomfortable with it means to me that we have more of a hope of changing the situation.
Or even the Iraq war. I felt at the time that it was totally unjustified, even if the Iraqis had proved to have WMDs, because the Bush administration never once presented any kind of argument that anything had changed in Iraq. Sure, Mr. Hussein was making threats-- just like he had been for years. Nothing. Had. Changed. To me it seemed then and seems now that the unspoken justification was religion- or race- or xenophobia- based. Since it was unspoken, it's hard to pin down. What is less hard to pin down is the fruit a decade and a half later of Mr. Trump's travel ban. Again, the "unspoken" became much more spoken and obvious and therefore revolting to more people and, I hope, more likely to lead to real change in our society.
Maybe I AM naive. But hearing all the people saying WHAT?!?!?! late rather than never is making me super happy right now. It makes me feel less alone. I definitely don't think that societal-level change is a foregone conclusion, but I truly don't think it is impossible or even super unlikely.
OK, one more thing. Joanne Freeman is currently my favorite historian of all time, and it would take a lot to knock her from her spot. She's an expert on colonial history generally and Alexander Hamilton in particular.
There's this one Hamilton document she talks about a lot. It's from right after the revolution, before the constitution is ratified. Hamilton is sort of writing notes to himself-- it's not for anyone else. He imagines different scenarios. He figures that if the constitution is ratified, then probably George Washington will be elected president, and that probably will bring enough stability that the young republic will survive to see another day. He thinks that if it isn't ratified, probably civil war and anarchy will follow. Then he says, "I think this is probably what will happen." And it was right after that when he started working on the Federalist Papers, which (according to Joanne Freeman, and I believe her) were not so much to explain the constitution as to propagandize for it.
I DO think a revolution is coming-- a good one. I think it will be a grind to haul our society back on course, but I think it is worth the effort. I think is not inevitable by a long shot, but definitely possible.
I love your blog. Thank you for writing it.