When I was a child, I was lucky and I didn’t know it. No one close to me died. When I became a teenager, my grandfather died, and I was absolutely shocked, completely blindsided. I don’t know why. Perhaps no one had prepared me. But he was 88 years old, and few people lived to 90 back in 1972. He was old. It should not have been surprising to me. I would not have put it in these terms back then, but I think I had an underlying, naive belief that my family and I were somehow immune from tragedy. And of course it was also a mistake to consider the death of an 88 year old man of natural causes to be a tragedy—because it’s not.
My grandmother followed her husband within the year, and a year later my own father died of a single heart attack.
By then I felt, naively again, that I was an old hand in responding to death. I wasn’t though—in fact, 50 years later I am still learning how to grieve. But I do think that the death of my father was a maturing event. Oh, I was still undeveloped in many many ways, but losing a parent was something that few of my peers had gone through. Somehow I felt initiated into a great shadowy depth of human experience. I felt a kind of belonging: this sorrow happens to everyone, if you live long enough and are lucky enough to love and be loved. And now it was happening to me.
Today I felt a different kind of revelation. Fascism has come to America, and what is most shocking is that it is being welcomed. I see friends on FB saying they are disappointed in and even ashamed of their fellow Americans. I don’t feel that kind of judgment. Not yet. I admit to feeling surprised. Seriously I feel naive again. Having been raised in a nearly idyllic (for white people) post war period in the late 50s/early 60s, I was spoon-fed on American exceptionalism. I wouldn’t have admitted this—even to myself—but I guess I thought it couldn’t and it wouldn’t happen here. But gosh, it seems to be happening here.
A few caveats—I know I am incredibly privileged, and that people of other ethnicities and sexual orientations could not afford the kind of blissful ignorance I’m speaking of. On the other end of the spectrum, the former president is not back in office yet, and we can’t know for sure how bad it will be. But that’s kinda beside my point.
I need to say that I don’t think we’re God’s favorite country. I don’t think God plays favorites. I don’t think we are the fulfillment of some utopian Biblical prophecy. And I don’t think if you’ve played nice in a past life your karmic reward will get you reincarnated in a plush upper middle class household here.
But what I’m seeing now is that we are changing and evolving just like every other group of people who have called themselves a nation in the long history of human experience. This kind of turmoil has happened to countless societies throughout the millennia, and now it is happening to us.
I don’t think America is exceptional. But it is our home, and that is why I love it. I don’t know what to do now, but eventually I guess I’ll figure something out, and then I’ll rejoin the fight (in a nonviolent way of course). Hope to see you out there.
I pray and affirm that we are good, compassionate people, and we will be gentle with each other.
Photo by Raychan on Unsplash