Zig zagging between fear and mortal dread
One of the pleasures of writing this column, in fact, one of the pleasures of being a writer is the opportunity to live in two worlds at once. I wake up in the morning like everyone else and go about the business of living my life more or less the way I always have. For me, that means going downstairs and turning on the coffee and feeding the cats and walking Ruby and coming back to the house to give her some crispies and put out birdfeed and peanuts for the birds and squirrels and then make some toast and carry it over to my desk in the front window to sit down and sip some coffee and begin to go through my emails.
It is the comfort of routine, the daily assurance that barring some medical event such as, in my case last year, the flu and a broken wrist, predictability is assured.
And yet, the events of the past year have changed things. It’s not like there was an explosion. It’s as if a fog drifted in that hasn’t dissipated. What I see as I walk Ruby and drive over to Key Food to pick up milk and bagels and apples and chicken thighs and butternut squash for dinner is a simulacrum of life. The alley where Ruby and I walk in the morning is still there, as is the stoplight by the Walgreens and the aisles in Key Food and my favorite check-out lady Kathy standing at her cash register asking how my day is going. But it all seems somehow temporary, and its limits do not come due to chance or from age.
It happens when I sit down and scroll through the news on the screen of my computer. It feels as if something has shifted in a way that I haven’t experienced since early in my adulthood, when one night my girlfriend and I sat in her apartment and felt so removed from life going on around us that it was as if the floor had fallen away and the ceiling had lifted and we were alone on a couch surrounded by nothingness.
It was the fact of another of our foreign wars across an ocean, this one Vietnam, that was causing fear and a sense of impending doom all around. You could see it on people’s faces, you could hear it in their voices, you could read it in the way their feet struck the sidewalk, you could read it between the lines in a letter from home. A lamp in a room threw less light on the wall. News disappeared and was replaced by threats. Even the clothes on our bodies became costumes. To pretend to be someone else was necessary protection against the unknown.
It feels unnervingly like that today. If you’re anything like Tracy and me, the sense that you’re just holding on has taken over. Elemental goals seem out of reach. Going to the airport and getting on an airplane to travel to see family or on vacation is now threatening. Sure, you identify yourself with documents like a drivers license or a passport, but you turn on the television and see that it’s not enough. Your identity as a citizen doesn’t make you feel safe but afraid.
It’s tempting to use cliché, but no cliché can capture the moment we are in. I had to watch our president talking to the press as he walked across the White House lawn to get into his helicopter. The man in the suit and the red tie was telling one lie after another, blistering the air with his delusions and anger at everyone and everything around him except the construction site of a gigantic ballroom that made sense to no one but him. He spoke of the war he started that has killed more than a thousand human beings as if he was talking about buying a new pair of golf shoes. His disconnection from the reality of who he is and what he has done to the world we live in was terrifying. It is impossible for us to know if his mental state is deteriorating, but it certainly seems to be. The scary thing is, it doesn’t matter. We are stuck with a president who is, for all intents and purposes, a madman.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was traveling with him, and as he followed the president, he looked lost, his eyes downcast, watching his step as if he was afraid that he would fall. This is not the way it is supposed to be. Our Secretary of State is supposed to look knowledgeable and confident and on top of his job. He wasn’t. He isn’t. He is in a position where it is his job to support a war that was begun with no discernable goals, and now even the ones that were invented have fallen by the wayside, and replaced by attempts at recovering what we have already lost, such as trade through the Strait of Hormuz, once taken for granted, now gone.
We are reduced to watching elements such as helium and carbon move from the background to become controlling substances in what is clearly a slide toward global recession. Soon, money will be worth less. People will die, and not from missiles and bombs, but from hunger and heat and cold.
We are passengers on a train that is not stopping. There is no getting off. The engineer has collapsed with his hand on the throttle. If we survive the next year without a nuclear accident or an intentional explosion somewhere in the Middle East, it will be a miracle. In the meantime, we wrestle to find meaning in a maelstrom that has made us afraid for ourselves and for each other.