COVID Reclusion and Unaddressed Rage

  

 

It’s almost two years since the Covid pandemic shut down life as we’d known it and changed lives in ways we weren’t predicting and surely didn’t anticipate.  There's really no end in sight.  We know that because a significant portion of our population refuses to do what's right.  

Kant thought that when we understood rationally what the right thing to do is, we'd do it and that we have a moral obligation to do it.  In other words, Kant thought that there was an imperative to good when reason presents a case with which we must concur.  Bless his Vulcan heart but that bird don't fly.  

People don't do what's right because it's right anymore than they will change their minds because the argument is sound.  Nah.  They will do whatever they want so far as they can.  I don't oppose rewarding or incentivizing those who can't be reasoned with and I don't care if they change their minds or come to the right conclusion: I only care that they no longer menace the rest of us.  That doesn't seem to be working, now does it?  

I’ve got no silver linings to these clouds today.  I also take the unpopular position that hope is an overrated, epicene emotion that more often misleads than inspires.  You may differ about this ‘cause sometimes, occasionally, maybe even I do.   I want to think that hope is important but for what and then?

Hope too often gives permission to bypass hard facts we would rather not admit.  We don’t need hope to go about a denial of the discommoding.  Most of us, like Melville’s scrivener Bartelby, would just prefer not to.   Why deal with reality when we have permission from no less than an adviser to the President to embrace “alternative facts.”  There is no reason to think that reason will prevail, much less the facts no matter how they impact those who disregard them.

 

Specious nonsense, dissimulation, and shameless disinformation are now the norm for a significant portion of our population.  Spare me the false equivalence too.  “Our” side is not as vulgar, as stupid, or as clever in the ways they seem to always get away with it.  That’s dispiriting and hope is no salve and certainly no remedy.   I wish I could embrace Obama’s hope because I don’t think he is disingenuous when he talks about it.  Like the way the Boss talks about faith.  But I just can’t wrap my head around any of these so-called moral arcs of history because they are human endeavors and nature don’t care.  Humans could make hope matter the same way they can move heaven and earth with faith but it’s a human choice to make a better world just as it is human to do our worst.  Do you really think there's an inveterate goodness to our body politic?

 

The New Pandemic World couldn’t have happened under worse circumstances in America because things weren’t going all that well for quite some time.  Trump’s election in 2016 was a culmination, almost Hegalian in its consummations, it was not a lark, no outlier: anyone could see it coming at least from at least the time of Reagan.

Reagan, I would contend, was not a fraud, not in the way Trump is an idiot: Reagan really believed in those backward values and terrible ideas that turned back the clock on civil rights, economic equality, and social progress.  Trump doesn't believe anything because he can't think past his need for immediate gratification.  America lives on immediate gratification so what makes it hard to fathom that more voted for Trump the second time than the first.  Of course, Obama didn’t stand a chance, not with these folks and I guess we were just too hopeful to see what was coming.  Trump simply grafted himself onto Our American Stupid, which is as afraid of living with other people as it is with itself.

But nothing compares with Trump---not in my lifetime, maybe not ever.  Who has so flagrantly disregarded from ignorance or willful antipathy the norms upon which the social contract of democracy depends? It’s more than lawlessness and the craven grift.  It’s a disdain for decency itself, as if being honorable or truthful is just for us suckers.

I have been mad and ashamed about this but I think it’s turned another corner.  I now expect no better because it would be fanciful and blithely naïve to think otherwise.  America will get what it deserves because our system favors the power of the minority to exert its will.  Now even that isn’t necessary, they have in the Court what they can’t get from Congress or the Presidency.

 

For the terror Trump brought upon the republic I have felt nothing less than horror, incredulity, disbelief, dismay, embarrassment, anger, dread, and disheartenment.  Of course his supporters have had every opposite feeling than mine, which leaves me even more alarmed.   I’m not shocked or in disbelief---I have always thought us capable of this kind of immature, insensible behavior: I consider this the next even-worse truth of the matter.

 

The morning in America clarion call of 1980 signaled our commitment to regression and it’s Trump who proved the point.  It is all far worse than we imagined.  Yeah, you’ll say there was was Obama but you’d be right to think that much of where we are today is Obama-backlash, that so many in America just couldn’t cope with the Black President and his family sleeping in the White House.  We don’t want to talk about our history of racism and nothing is going to make us.  We can hope for better but how does that help?

Educators have known for decades that a significant portion of this country is, for the most part, unqualified for demands of citizenship in a democracy that must contend with global realities that crystallize in the virtual-sphere immediately and into the “real world” nanoseconds later.  Information is the true revolution and like all revolutions this one is going badly.

 

I’m not writing to say things are hopeless.  I have no faith in hopeless anymore than I have hope.  What I have is the feeling that our situation isn’t rational nor is the country mature or serious enough to address its problems.  I don’t know what will happen next.  Maybe there will be enough inspired and motivated voters to outlast the dying demographics.  Maybe there is more decency than I see around me.  Living surrounded by historic homestead graveyards that include the Union dead, what I see in their yards are Confederate flags.  Of course this is my neck of the woods.  But it is all across rural America that we are witnessing this partisan divide.  

I am not giving up on life because that would do no good.  I love life and everyday I am astounded by nature, by science, by art and our pup Sadie.

I am not hopeful that pandemic will even subside enough to let us go to India next year or even the year after.  What will I be like without having been to India in my 65^th year when all I have ever wanted is to share in darshan of the Dancer with you?

For now it is going to have to be the building of the Hojoki.  I need to write about that.  That word likely means nothing to anyone reading this zuihitsu.  In medieval Japan the Hojoki was the refuge of the recluse.  Literally the 10’ square hut.  I need one of those and maybe you do too.

It’s only two weeks to the anniversary of our house fire.  I remember that the moon was full that night as the house was burning.  That’s how my heart feels a year later and two years into this quarantine.

I know I still burn inside and that the moonlight does not always soothe.  It’s at least another month before the Hojoki has its windows so I’ll need to make more room inside to find the beauty.  There's so much beauty and wonder.  Not even Trump or America or our despair can stanch that sense sublime of what lies so deeply interfused.