Anhedonia

Like any thirteen-year-old boy whose father was a mythic and random presence, whose anger and generosity were dispensed with equal fervor and spontaneity, I longed to be with him. He taught me to play golf, and we would go out in the late afternoon when the shadows of big oaks lay upon the fairways like the first footprints of night. Often we were interrupted by someone in a golf cart coming out to tell my father he was needed to deliver a baby. I think that’s why to this day I don’t like golf carts.

“Anhedonia” is the term for a loss of pleasure in activities that were previously enjoyable, It can be a symptom of depression, but it’s a stand-alone condition too. No one is quite sure what causes it. For me, in the case of golf, I know what happened: Dad died when I was still a young man. Without his squinting approval when I hit a good shot, it just wasn’t as much fun.

Lately, I find myself experiencing a more generalized form of anhedonia. What has happened to bring that on? It is my fear that, like my father before it, my homeland is dying.

Our body politic is suffering multiple organ failures. Longstanding norms of governance are becoming necrotic. Flagrant exploitation of political position for personal gain is suddenly acceptable. People who have lived her peacefully for decades, who have raised families and paid their fair share of taxes to support the government, are being scooped up off the streets and deported. Our leaders have become swaggering bullies and opportunists.

When my father was dying, I slept in his hospital room for two weeks. I couldn’t save him, but I could be with him. Now that my country is sick, I want to comfort it, but I don’t know how. There is no bedside to sit by, no hand to hold, only the restless tossing and turning of people living in fear, feverishly calling out from the shadows.

My country doesn’t have cancer. The death of tolerance, of the burning quest for scientific knowledge, of the search for better ways to feed and house as many as possible, isn’t a certainty. Historically, our Congress and courts have been our immune system to fight rogue executives. This Congress either doesn’t fully understand the current threat, or, more likely, does and is happy to feed like a parasite on its weakened host. 

The lower courts are trying to protect our constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court is all in on granting the executive virtually unchecked power to do as he pleases in hiring, firing, spending and mobilizing the army to enforce his will.

We are, for the time being, until elections stem the tide, if indeed they do, left to resort to homeopathic remedies of the oldest kind: protesting in the streets

It is dangerous to be seen resisting this vengeful government, which is not quite to the stage of dragging villagers out of their homes and shooting them in front of their neighbors, but is dragging them out of their homes and jailing and deporting them, and investigating and perp-walking its political enemies.

In this moment, we only have each other. 

I went to the first No Kings rally, and I’m going to the one this Saturday. I have no illusions about what will come of that, but it seems to me we have no other choice but to let this government, and the world, know that what is going on here is not okay. Maybe someone who can make a difference—Congress, for instance—will notice and do something to help save the land of the free and home of the brave.

Or perhaps that’s too idealistic, too aspirational. Congress is made up of our elected representatives, so we can at least hope that if they sense that the tide of voter sentiment is surging strongly toward traditional views of what is appropriate, and what is not, in our democracy, they will act, if not out of common sense and decency, out of that most basic instinct of all organisms: survival.