America, Love it or Leave it.

I’m reading a book about the rise of Nazi Germany, and it’s making me mad. I’m sad about what Hitler and his henchmen did to Jews and gypsies and anyone who opposed them, but I’m mad that it’s happening again. Right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Vienna is rioting, Hitler said. I have to go in to restore order. The Austrians implore me.

Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the World Trade towers collapsed, Trump said, as part of his justification for his Muslim immigration ban. We need to get those people out of here, that was his message.

Hitler burned books and imprisoned anyone who wrote the truth about what he was doing. Trump has done a pretty good job of turning many of us against the liberal media, those purveyors of FAKE NEWS. Or, as the rest of us know it: the truth.

Hitler only wanted Poland, he told the appeasers. Trump has lied about his intentions on so many fronts, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s one that’s going to hurt a lot of people: he promised to keep healthcare protections for pre-existing conditions; now his justice department is saying they are unconstitutional.

When I was growing up in the South, it seemed like a particularly patriotic area. Big signs along the highways proclaimed our love of our country and our culture: “Impeach Earl Warren” (the author of the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation decision, a clearly un-American point of view in the south in 1954). “America, Love it or Leave it” nicely summed up a widely held sentiment.

So, I did.

Or at least I left the part of the country that I thought was still uniquely in the thrall of Jim Crow’s inability to accept the outcome of the Civil War.

I went to L.A. It was not long after the Watts Riots. Ronald Reagan was the governor. I should have realized that racism and xenophobia weren’t confined to the South, but I was young and naive and idealistic. 

Now I know. 

I never thought Trump would be elected. I thought we were better than that. So did Jon Stewart. We were both wrong.

Jon Stewart said he quit The Daily Show because he was tired of being so angry. He said watching Fox News to get material for his show was like being a “turd miner.” He said he hoped he didn’t get “turd-lung disease.”

I wish he’d hung in there. Maybe he could have kept us sane and grounded enough to not fall under Trump’s charismatic spell. I doubt it, though. Only people who already agreed with him watched his show. That and those who wanted sound bites to mock him.

Well, I’m with Jon now. I’m angry. And, like him, I’m tired of being angry, but (no offense intended to Jon, who did yeoman’s work for 15 years) I’m determined not to quit. We’ve all seen what happened when the good people of Germany stopped resisting. That’s all it takes for the cancer of hatred to spread. 

We are our body-politic’s immune system. We are weakened now, but we are not wiped out. We need to fight. We need to attack. If we don’t, our way of life will die. Just as it did in Nazi Germany. Just as it did in Fascist Italy and Spain. Just as it does whenever good people look the other way until it is too late.

Time to Go From the Land of Mow and Blow

As if from a dream, I’ve just awakened to the fact that gardeners have captured my neighborhood. They are an occupying force of pickup trucks, mowers and leaf blowers. Don’t get me wrong, I like gardeners. Most in our area are friendly and conscientious, and they make the yards look beautiful. Lately, though, those beautiful yards are starting to look like plots in a peaceful cemetery.

Time to go. Not to escape the leaf blowers, but to run from my own mortality.

We moved to the suburbs for the kids. Safe streets for biking, good schools, lots of soccer fields, even a children’s theatre where they could be the stars of the show. Our neighborhood was great for them. They thrived. They left.

It turns out I can only stand so much pastoral tranquility. The kids kept the place hopping, but now all the silent beauty is a little depressing. I need some buzz.

There are plenty of places I visit that are buzzy. But mainly they’re far from friends and parents. I’m over thinking I can jet off to some exotic place and do my own thing and when I come back everything will be the same. So I have to find some nearby buzz. San Francisco, I think.

I don’t want to trade sidewalks bordered with flowers for ones blooming with the tents of homeless men and women, but that seems to be the trade I have to make. 

The problem with great cities is the same thing that gives them energy: a diverse population swarming in a frenzy of activity, all kinds of activity, solid and sordid, beautiful and vile, inspiring and disheartening. I love the inspiring parts, not so much the disheartening ones.

I think it’s more than the obvious ugliness, the trash and heroine needles, that bothers me. It’s the lost lives that force themselves on me, into me. I can’t just see them and ignore them. I have to try to understand why. I have to try to solve it. Ask my children: I can’t resist trying to solve everyone’s problems.

Big city solutions aren’t simple, of course. People do what they do, and in our society, by and large, we let them, as long as what they’re doing isn’t hurting anyone. 

This is where homelessness gets so tough. People have a right to be homeless. This means, by implication, that they have a right to sleep on a park bench, under a freeway overpass, perhaps in a sidewalk tent outside a local shop or restaurant.

California is home to one-fourth of the nation’s homeless. There are many more now than in the past. It’s apparent that we don’t know how to handle them. Are they our neighbors, who, were we in a small country town, we would try to help back on their feet, maybe even put up in a spare bedroom? Or are they dangerous people—mentally ill, addicted—whom we are afraid of and would like to see go somewhere else, anywhere else?

We try, I think. We build shelters and roll out busses outfitted with showers. But the numbers keep getting worse. The anecdotes keep getting worse. On both sides.

My kids have been gone for years now. My feeling of personal identification with the potted plants that surround me has been growing for years: “Get out of there before the soil takes you.” 

So why have I put it off? The city is expensive, sure, but I think if I’m honest with myself I’ve drug my feet because I don’t know if I have it in me to take on its problems. If I live there, I won’t be able to look away from the homeless. Not their blight, not their tormented lives, not the hopelessness of it all. I know I’ll have to try to help, if only in small ways. That’s what neighbors do for one another. I hope I’m up to it.