Due to the stresses at the end of the school year and my resolution to NOT do any writing on my vacation I think this blog has had its longest ever hiatus (not that anyone noticed.) Appropriately enough, I caught COVID on that vacation (still worth it) and am sitting on my screened-in back porch, my children remarkably sanguine about our 4th plans being canceled.
In the past two weeks I have felt intense, literal physical vertigo on multiple occasions, an unsettling sensation that applies to my mental state whenever I contemplate the state of the nation. For example, my school's end of year teacher gathering was held on a boat docked in the Hudson. I was on it for five minutes before getting puking sick and having to go home (I suffer pretty badly from motion sickness.) At Disney with my family I made the mistake of taking "non-drowsy" Dramamine, which should be called "non-working." I managed to recover and get back on the rides but I spent a couple of hours feeling like absolute garbage.
I got spiritual vertigo from the Supreme Court's decisions destroying reproductive rights, erasing church/state boundaries, and promoting gun proliferation, along with the revelations of the 1/6 hearings. The "non-drowsy" medication failing to fix this vertigo happened to be the tepid response from the gerontocratic Democratic Party leadership and general apathy in the population apart from those already politically committed.
I'm sitting here now in COVID quarantine, anxious and tired and without anything to distract me from contemplating the reality of what faces the nation on this July 4th. Reading about a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, only makes my anxiety worse. For the past seven years of my life I feel like I have been watching the chickens of the past four decades coming home to roost. Ever since I was able to consume and understand the news in the 80s I have been hearing about increasing econommic inequality, racist policing, Christian nationalists forcing their vision on the country, mass shootings, and a general loss of faith in the future. Back in the 80s one could look back 20 years to the 60s to contemplate the possibilities of radical change, but for people of my generation, we never experienced such a time our lives. For younger people the rot was already obvious decades before they were born. My entire life we have been confronted by the same same structural problems and nothing has been done to fix them.
I have been contemplating the collapse of the American Empire for just as long, but I always assumed it would be like Britain's: a long, managed deflation. Now I forsee something like the Soviet Union's fate. I am sure the average Soviet citizen in 1988, even in the midst of perestroika and glasnost, had no thought that the USSR would cease to exist at all in three years' time. January 6th proved that the Right is willing to use force to seize power. The rigging of the Supreme Court and the rigging of state elections through gerrymandering and suppression mean that minoritarian rule is already here. We are basically seeing a return to the post-Reconstruction American political order, complete with white supremacist militias.
Driving South to Florida I could not help but notice the gun store billboard with an assault weapon proclaiming one could but "Guns Ammo Freedom" there. I could not fail to notice the trucks that had both blue line flag decals and "don't tread on me" logos. Their drivers see no contradiction between praising the state's wielders of violence while proclaiming their independence. Freedom is for them, state violence is for other people. That is the folk fascism that dominates large swathes of this country, including much of the military and law enforcement. If push comes to shove I have no doubt which side those institutions will take, and how eagerly they will deputize those truck owners.
And even without the horrific prospect of open civil conflict, I still live in a country where in many areas ten year old rape victims are forced to carry their pregnancies to term and where Black suspects are shot 50 times by the police and their corpses handcuffed. (Both of these incidents took place in Ohio last week.) Mass bloodshed still takes place even if there aren't battle flags in places like Buffalo, Highland Park, and Uvalde. So many progressive minded people, including myself, don't really see a way forward. If we maintain a democracy in this country I imagine it will be by dumb luck. I'm planning on taking some mental Dramanine in quaratine this week so I can shake this vertigo and figure out what the hell needs doing.
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