Knots

I am not sure what everyone else goes through when feeling stressed, I can only speak for myself. There were times growing up when I would feel a nervous twinge in the pit of my stomach. A feeling of being a little disconnected, a little lost to the moment. If my parents were home, I would seek their proximity and would feel better. If they were out, I would go to their bedroom. There was something calming about just crossing the threshold. I would sit in one of their chairs or explore my father’s top dresser drawer until I felt at ease. In that drawer I would touch his tie pins and cufflinks, poke at his pads containing notes and bits of his life, and feel the wooden beads of his rosary slip through my fingers. In finding my parents or the symbols of my parents I was reassured and made safe.

It has been several decades since I have lived with my parents, in fact they are no longer around to visit much less live with. But I feel they raised me well, and the strength I once sought from them I have attempted to pass along to my wife and children (and have watched them do the same with their families). Still there are times as an adult that I get worried, that a knot twists in my belly. For the past two years especially, I have felt that knot daily.

This is not a tangle within me that can be eased by a visit to mom’s and dad’s bedroom, or by the cool feel of wooden beads on my fingertips. It cannot be eased in talking to my wife, or children, or friends. In many ways sharing my feelings just tightens the knot because there is no one to invalidate my fears.

In the microcosm of one’s life, parents, family, the circle of close friends help smooth rough spots. Similarly for American society, our government functions much the same way for citizens – at least for me. When the world turns frightening as on September 11^th, knowing my government and my president were there to defend us and to rally a world of allies in support of us gave me some calm upon those turbulent seas.

I don’t have that security now. Our president works to divide people. Our president works to subvert faith in the judiciary, the congress, law enforcement. Our president works to separate us from a world of friends while embracing well known enemies. I cannot at this time look to my government to untie my knots, the government has become fractured, ultra-partisan, and contentious or servile depending on the side of the aisle that is viewed. It has been made this way by the master of knots, Donald Trump.

When the nation’s “father” is the stressor and the uncertainty, we are without a core. Rather than a cohesive orb, we have become fractured flotsam in irregular orbits about a volatile center that seems to threaten a big bang or big crunch at any moment. We have no room to enter for peace, no words to read that can bring comfort. Even our founding document is being used and taken advantage of in ways the framers never imagined.

I want better for my country. I want better guardians than the polarized few we have elected. I want a president and representatives that think first of what is best globally, nationally, and personally for the citizens. Now it seems all about power, the president has it, his party wants to keep it, and opposition wants to take it away. Where has love, peace, and understanding retreated to in the presence of paranoia and fear? Where has the security gone? Where is my parents’ bedroom, and the drawer with the icons of my father?

Wedges

Political times are difficult these days. I watch and follow them. I listen and learn. I fear. I fear. I fear.

But how to comment? The difficulty is that if I address the NFL questions, I miss out on the larger topic of race. If I delve into that larger topic, I ignore Puerto Rico. If I dive into Puerto Rico, I forget about health care. If I chase health care, I miss tax reform. If I discuss tax reform, I leave North Korea on an island, in the middle of the water, and that water is an ocean, and it is a big ocean.

I look at all these and so much more and I reel, stagger, stumble, fall. In a daze on the ground, I realize that these topics are a distraction. That one covers for another, that to focus on one is to chase a shadow while other shadows scamper about diverting attention and energy.

I look to the constitution and find beauty in its offerings, its flexibility, its existence as a living document to make itself available to change and inclusion. But it also sows the seeds of its potential downfall. The openness it permits allows for nooks and crannies, that can be exploited by wedges.

President Trump has shown himself to be a master of wedges. In a recent speech in Alabama he said, “I brand people, that’s what I do, I brand people.”  He does far more than that. His gift for naming extends to casting expersions and doubts. What is really happening here is that we have elected a president who finds gaps then drives wedges.

As a boy, I helped my father split firewood. My father being who he was had a lot of logs for us to split and save for winters. If memory serves me, he had logs for far more winters than we would see together as a family of seven before empty nesting would set in. I loved splitting logs with dad. He would bring out the sledge hammer and his wedge, and he taught be to drive the wedge into the log and cause a rift and eventually a split. That wedge and those rifts come back to me now all too vibrantly.

We have been foolish to overestimate the progress of race relations in this country, we have been complacent in how we perceive our journalism, and we would rather think that we have nestled into our classes than see that divisions abound.

President Trump is a genius in his egocentrism. He sees all of this and more, and he sees it in the only context that he really perceives anything – himself. In his ceaseless defense of self, he has carefully selected wedges, and driven them into the heart of America in a rhythm of his own choosing.

Through the NFL he has driven a wedge between people and the safe haven of sports where we live our fantasies and hold onto teams as if they were religious icons. While we have been seeking the simple joy that our favorites are national champions or world champions or just heroes that we can carry on broad shoulders into our dreams, President Trump has made them into constitutional threats.

Through race, President Trump has exploited the fragile delusion that things are better than they are. He has exploited the subtly growing rifts to be viewed as an attack on veterans instead of a protest of inequality, and that new arrivals to this land are stealing desired jobs and wages while milking the economy and funneling in gang members and drugs. He takes a wedge and seats it firmly in the earth to push apart our trust in media, and using similar wedges to drive gaps between the populace and the congress, as-well-as between the people and the judiciary.

If you remove our heroes, if you remove our trust in the legislature, if you take away a belief that the judiciary is a necessary balancing force, if you destroy our judgement regarding the fourth estate, if you reinstate African Americans and Latinos as the insidious enemy, what is there left to believe in? The answer is obvious, inescapable, and far more scary than I would dare imagine. Our only refuge is President Trump, and that sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship.

When a leader intentionally works at stripping the bonds of society from any political and moral groundings than his or herself, they are working toward a dictatorship. They are trying to establish a government driven by a single individual instead of the constitutionality mandated by separations of power.

It is October, Halloween is coming. I was hoping to be cowered by ghost and ghoulies, to have my pulse raised by wonderful superstition and myth. Instead, I sit afraid of something much greater, my own government.