There Must Be Something I Can Do

When a problem comes up, I know what to do. Call the plumber. Call the doctor. These days, though, I'm stumped. We have a big problem in the country right now, and I don't know what I can do about it. It's not unsolvable, it's just unsolvable by me. 

I don't need to tell you what I'm talking about. We all know. Of course, a large number of us don't think it's a problem at all. They think their savior has finally arrived.

By that reckoning, from my point of view, the problem isn't the problem itself, but that half of us think it's not a problem, just the opposite. So we're kind of stuck in a tug of war with a lot of strength on both sides. The other team is stronger, though, and they are pulling us in the direction they want to go. The people on our side are getting rope burn and slipping and falling in the mud.

That makes it sound more sporting than it is. Losing this struggle is going to do a lot more damage than bleeding hands and muddy bodies.

I would be fine if we all put down the rope and sat down to try to work out a way to get along that we could all live with. Talking and trying to get along is just not happening now. To the victor go the spoils seems to be the motto of the team that's winning. And too bad for the losers who can't take care of themselves when the battle is over.

Our government is running roughshod over its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. And it is being brutally cruel to non-citizens who have been living and working peacefully here for decades. Sure, there are bad-actor immigrants, just as there are bad-actor citizens. The solution in both cases is arrest with probable cause, not stopping brown-skinned people on the street and demanding their papers.

I'm neither weak nor vulnerable (yet), and I don’t want to just stand by and do nothing. Wrong is wrong, inhumane is inhumane. Not only is it morally wrong to look away, but, as the famous poem goes, "and then they came for me."

But I have no idea what I can do that would make a nickel's worth of difference. I've never felt so helpless.

Marching in the protests and giving more money than ever before in my life to the ACLU have been all I have been able to come up with so far. That and calling a dear hispanic friend of our family who lives in LA and telling her not to go out of her house without her citizenship card.

My actions so far have been so pitifully small and ineffective that it is embarrassing. It's making me wonder if I really care as much as I think I do. I'll confess I have considered a long trip to somewhere else. The problems here always look better to me from Europe. That might help my peace of mind, but it's not going to help anyone else. I don't know if I can live with that.

And I don't know if I can live with the alternative of watching our governance by laws and accepted norms, the source of our freedom and opportunity, become a thing of the past. 

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 here 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.