Even More than my Disdain for Trump is my Disdain for who we as Citizens have Become

To engage in a calm conversation with a being who holds a different political view from your own is difficult right now. In this particular election season, the animus is so intense. Each side views the other as potential destroyers of our nation.

In my Facebook stream I posted a quote from a Mother Jones article the other day. The words and thoughts were what one author believed was the underlying story of the Trump campaign. I don't think what was written is far off.

The quoted narrative implies the story of the conservative mindset that has given rise to the Tea Party and to Trumpism is one of theft, favoritism and denial.  The story is that the American dream is being taken from us, the middle class or people who think they used to be middle class or people on the cusp of making it into the middle class, by “others” who have no real claim to it.  These other people are mostly identified as migrants, refugees and poorer Americans.  These people are thieves stealing opportunity and wealth from us. It is a powerful narrative in a nation where the gap between rich and poor is growing and where the middle class is not prospering as it had in the past.

There is a different story that underlies liberal thought. The liberal story I see is a view of a government focused on helping through action, not indifference or by insisting on “self-reliance”. This story is pretty much the antithesis of the story underlying Trump’s popularity. 

This liberal narrative is twofold. First immigrants and the poor are not stealing from us. All of us are in actuality the product of immigration to this place. Most of our families started out on the bottom rungs. We should therefore not demonize these people. Instead we should help them with food assistance and with housing assistance and various other forms of aid. We have at times demonized religion of others in this country, Catholics and Jews have taken a hit along with others. But these faiths have not destroyed us. Neither will Islam. We are a secular nation and we while we have a right to assert to assert conformity with the norms set forth in our Constitution, we have no right to mess with value systems of others here beyond that.

The second prong of the liberal story is the American dream is not being stolen by the poor and the immigrant; our cherished dream is being stolen my multinational corporations and by the legislators that are beholden to them. Citizens United is a mockery of justice. Demonizing the worker and the union member makes no sense. Descriptors applied to American workers, especially union workers include lazy, self-indulgent, unwise with money, devious, promiscuous….hmmh…aren’t these terms we used in the past to subjugate by law our black population? It is the money that has flowed from corporations into the pockets of the majority of our politicians that has derailed us. Yeah the laws that are being written are not to insure equality and opportunity, instead they are now drafted to insure the institution of a ruling class of wealth and wealth alone. This is the liberal story.

Neither of the stories is exactly true.  Supporting the conservative story there are abuses that have occurred with social welfare programs.  On the liberal side there have been injustices done to good, honest people just trying to integrate into our American life. We could go point by point through these stories and come with examples that support both sides.  To some extent that is what we have to do.  We have to look at the laws in place and the practices in place and decide what is working and what is not.  If we build a wall who will fill the lower end jobs in food service, agriculture and some of the construction trades?  If we allow indefinite payments to able bodied persons through various forms of welfare how do we not create a class of dependent Americans?

In the end what we have to do is deal with the problems not as a sound bite, not as someone else’s problem but as something we collectively tackle as a people.  Blow up the TV folks and move on.  Go to town council meetings and ask why giving tax breaks to a particular developer really makes sense for the economic welfare of your city.  Run the numbers as to graduation rates in your high school and figure out who isn’t making it to commencement.  Could the lack of academic success be tied to poverty?  Well then dig in and think about how we deal with this.  Does preschool free breakfast and tutoring make sense. Do our trade policies and our own patterns of consumption undercut the strength of our democracy?  Hey I own an iPhone that was built in China and as a result I have helped create a trade imbalance in favor of that undemocratic society, a place that pollutes even more than we do. Should my next phone be made in America?  Do we even still make phones in America?

In the end it is our individual engagement that will save our democracy if it is to be saved.  Me I don’t think a vote for a person who’s answer to trade imbalance is to tear up free trade agreements and to illegal immigration is to build a wall gets us there. I think Trump is a fraud and a vote of frustration for Trump will do us no good. But for others the narrative is one that paints a woman as deceitful and a trickster at best. It is not an easy season to enter the voting booth.

The bottom line for me is that we have to move away from our narcotics, TV, the internet and tons of other distractions and diversions.  We need to get back to work in being citizens.  It is frustrating and maddening but we have to do it.  We have to take back our government from the corruption that large amounts of money have engendered and figure out what works to advance us a society within the framework of our Constitution. 

Summer is Over and the Carnival is Leaving Town.

We have all heard the hundreds of songs about the last train leaving the station.  Just as many songs exist about the parting of a true love for a distant state or country. Some of the themes are overwrought and some are plaintive.  Gender is not a defining mark of these tales of sadness for the singer might be male or female.  Some songs exist about an era coming to an end or a beloved bar being torn down. But few really convey the sense of loss when good friends, true friends are being scattered  to the four corners of the country.

My sense of loss began a few years ago when one friend, then another and then another retired and fled the place where I live.  Off they went to Florida, North Carolina, Florida and some just stayed here nominally but turned to long and distant travels for their routine. With each friend that called it quits there was a bit of an empty space that was left hanging.  I missed their wit and companionship.  One of my favorite songs of the nineteen seventies is a Dylan tune as sung by the Band, Life is a Carnival. But in the past week the big tent’s poles of the gaudy show have begun to come down.

Eight days ago I was in the middle of a journey from my boyhood home back to the place where I have lived for forty of the last forty two years.  Completed was a farewell visit to two wonderful and beautiful people in a place they loved and had made a home. Soon they will sell this place where they have raised their family and entertained thousands of people. Their going will live a big hole in the world their very open corner lots lives have occupied.

When I say I was melancholy most people these days don’t get the meaning.  As a word it is overused.  Sadness tied to deep thought, that is what melancholy is.  Melancholy isn’t a transient blue moment.  The sadness that is melancholy comes from analysis and introspection. I am melancholy.

Looking out at the lush green trees that cover most of northern Pennsylvania as one travels west on Interstate 70 in the past would have in the past been a cleansing moment for me.  Vacation born giddiness would be in the state of being replaced by a return to the common reality of my job, my home, well the life I lead in Michigan in general. Normally I would be rested and I would be holding onto a thread of hidden joy knowing that in two years’ time I would be returning to this spring of energy for another drink.

Not this time. As the trees flew by I felt lost.

The place of refuge will be gone. My hosts of many years will be gone.  They are selling their house on the bay.  The house two block from the Atlantic Ocean in most likelihood will be gone.  It was not my house but this beautiful pink palace near the sea had been the well from which I had consumed the refreshing waters of the good life from for many years. So many things added together make up why I love being by the sea with people who care about me and about who I care.

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

By the sea the air is different.  Hanging like a sheet that will not dry draped over you as you try to sleep with the windows open at night, your skin always feels damp from its touch. You can both smell the saline nature of the ocean and taste it.  Salt sea air clears your sinuses.  Salt sea air is as potent as a SSRI (benzodiazepine) to calm the troubled racing active brain.  Easy access to my favorite drug, that is the sound of ocean waves, will be gone. Time with two of the greatest people I know will be much more limited.  And at this stage there is less time ahead of me than there is behind me.

When I got back my “family” continued exploding.  Two people who had been there for all the major moments of our lives left two days ago in a crammed full car heading to Colorado. Off to the Rockies they went for their retirement.  We drove her to the hospital to deliver their first child.  They were there to talk us through when our first child was born.  In the old days we drank like fiends and explored almost every nook and cranny of Michigan.  We stayed at rustic campsites and canoed countless rivers.  We drank beer and a lemonade punch that was to die for.  We went to Europe and were rascals together.

As they departed we cracked open a tontine, a cognac from 1964.  We bought the bottle in the late 1980s/early 1990s for $110.  Online estimates for the bottle placed the worth now at about $ 600.  We committed to drinking it when a very major life event occurred. Their departure counted as such an event.

The cork had disintegrated but had been intact enough to keep the liquor sealed in.  After decanting the bottle, we drank a number of glasses and then we pulled out old pictures and talked. We laughed about the camping trip where it rained all the way around Lake Huron as we circled that lake in tents.  We talked about the rafting trip down a Pennsylvania river. Pony bottles of Rolling Rock and Maryland crabs cooked at the campsite were as gourmet a meal as you could ever expect in this lifetime. There were memories of things long forgotten that were shared and fact checked against other memories.

In the morning I had a wee hangover and they were gone.  Left on my lawn was a cone stolen from Michigan Bell 20+ years ago.  The cone and a sake set had been traded back and forth as comic gifts for almost two decades wrapped up in various disguises.  Stupid pranks to be sure but the kind of things people do when they really, really care about each other. The joke was part of a common language drawn from years of experiences some good and some bad but all shared.

On a Sunday morning when I am cooking an omelet at 8 a.m. and brewing two pots of coffee, regular for everyone else and decaffeinated for me, there will come a time when I will think of what to do today and I will wonder are Terry and Barb doing.  Maybe I could mooch a swim in their pool.  Maybe this is a night for a rib dinner.  Maybe we should be doing something else just for shits and grins.  Then my mind will come back to reality and realize they are gone, way gone, to the mountains of Colorado.  Wistfulness and ache.

On a rough Thursday evening after a horrendous day when I wonder what the hell am I doing this for there will come a moment when I need my beloved Atlantic and I will pick up the phone and call Don.  But he won’t be by that big old body of water anymore.  He will have watched the sunset on the usually gentle coast, facing the waters toward the west out that lead way out into the gulf. He will be the same but the connection to what is the source of my soul’s balm the north Atlantic’s water will be available to him only as it is available to me in memory. 

Things are changing drastically as this the summer of 2016 comes to an end.  The carnival is packing up and it won’t be coming back. As I sit here in my back yard listening to the ravens go caw, caw in their prehistoric way I am adrift.  The light is golden and the air is almost perfect temperature wise.  As I look about there is so much work to be done.  Maybe I will bury myself in the small tasks and then the bigger tasks that have been deferred.  I don’t know.  But when I need that extra hand or bit of heart things will be different.

There is a coda to this. No matter how much I feel a sense of loss now, it has been worth it. Without Don and Sue, without Terry and Barb my life would have been much less rich.  I would have been a lesser person.  The colors in the painting that is my life would be flatter and duller. The friendships are not over but they will be different. There is still some cognac left to drink. I owe them all debt I can never repay.