HALF AND HALF



The votes continue to be counted.   

(When I started writing this morning, the verdict had still not been determined.)

As of 9:30PM, ET...JOE BIDEN WON THE ELECTION!!!

Yes, fyoosh, thank you thank you thank you thank you, for us, for our daughters, for our sons, for the climate, for goodness sake FOR ALL THINGS SANE AND TRUE.

And, though Jesse, Opal and I just finished a brief but fairly noisy celebration-hug-fest upstairs that got the dog all fired up and made Ruth cover her ears and cry, I have many feelings in addition to relief/relief/relief.

***

The election was agonizingly close down the line. It was a pie cut directly down the middle—half blue and half red.

On election night, the night of the 3rd, I felt a quiet terror when RED creeped over the election map like the time the cat knocked red wine out of my mom's hand, causing it to pour onto the white carpet, a real-time litmus-test splotch, and we searched google "how to get wine out of carpet" and proceeded with caution and intention and patience to step-by-step remove the stain. 

I lie in bed on the night of the 3rd thinking, how can we remove THIS STAIN? How can we make there be less RED? And there was the morning of the 4th, before the calculations for the mail-in ballots had started in earnest and Trump was leading just enough to maintain a steady glob of nausea in the pit of my gut.

Five days after Election day, Biden continued to (oh so) slowly and steadily creep up in votes, as was expected since the democrats were the ones to do mail-in ballots, because they were respecting the other RED growth on the map—the COVID growth, the pandemic sprawl, RED on RED. It's as if the map-outline of our country were flesh and the Covid RED was a tumor that can be treated but doesn't work so well when only treated by half. I wished that BLUE had poured over the map or at least taken more of the pie so we could stop with our eyes glued to our fucking phones and finish it already. 

***

I recently stumbled on a photo of a woman wearing a tank top that said, Trump can grab my pussy. And oh how mightily quick I wanted to judge that woman. How horrified I would feel if this were my grown daughter. Her mom must be thinking, Where did I go wrong?

But wait. 

Just WAIT a minute.

What in the hell do I know about this woman? Maybe her mom bought her that shirt? Maybe her mom never showed her an iota of empathy and taught her that sex was power and so this shirt, in her mind, is as kin to a superhero cape that she'll ever get? Maybe she's a really decent person who is simply used to being referred to as a pussy. Maybe her life has been a brutal, uphill struggle and she feels like everyone has done her wrong and her circumstances have kept her poor and she gets a twinge of camaraderie every time Trump lies his way out of a moment because when she cheated on a test at school, she got spanked, even though her parents never helped her to study. And when he cheated on a test, he became president.

***

The basis of our conversational diet over the last four years has been the question: How can so many people support Donald Trump as a leader? There's also COVID and spikes in numbers and online school and masks and all the rest. But that one simple yet profound inquiry has become a daily koan.

But maybe that question is framed just as much US/THEM as anything else—? 

Trump has helped me to see that there are many, so many, people out there who feel they have no other option to get ahead in life than to hustle/cheat/bully/insult/demean. What are we to feel about them? If Trump has shown us anything, it's that it simply doesn't work to say they are bad, we are good

Our president speaks fluently in the language of galvanization, which drives us further apart, lights fire to the dumpsters as well as to the forests as well as to compassion and democracy. But I'm doing the same thing when I wince at an image of a Trump rally, where mobs of Trump supporters are jammed into a small space with no masks and no social distance, in order to stroke the POTUS's ego. My reaction is to recoil and it's visceral. 

YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

I don't remember ever feeling such intense feelings of disconnection toward people in the RED party as I do now—never ever, even when George W. was president. Never has the RED party ever felt more like THEM/THOSE PEOPLE. Goes to show that even if I don't believe the president's hateful rhetoric and ignorant stereotypes, it's still in the water I've been drinking for four years.

I'm ready for new water. I'm ready for a different narrative, for god's sake.

After four years of Trump-speak piped in through every orifice, it takes a concerted effort to consider that the pussy-shirt lady—like all Trump-supporters, like all Biden-supporters—is more than a color. She is a flesh-and-blood person. And she is half our country, half our state, half our neighborhood, half our village, half our household. 

Last night, Jesse said, Honey, there is a much bigger issue going on. This country was founded on the backs of so so many suffering people. (Colonization and appropriation of native peoples, of systemic white privilege, for starters.) And if we are not tending to the deeper hurt of this country, if we are not considering what is broken and what needs healed, then—like in any system—of course we will be split. 

I'm not going to try and track down the pussy-shirt lady and be her friend on Facebook or anything. Something tells me she wouldn't be keen on that idea even if I did. Something also tells me she may be pissed at my ruminating about her interior world. 

What I am going to try to do is not insta-loathe her so much as to be curious about her. 

What I am going to do is try and create more room between Thought and Judgment. A pause, a neck-circle, a forced-yawn, a breath, a door cracked open, before the auto-US/THEM thinking kicks in. 

That flicker, that portal, that moment of seeing her humanity, is where the detox begins. 



Comments

Followers

Popular Posts