Seasons of Rage and Lament

Today, I”m making time for lament. I know we need to keep calm and carry on, but sometimes you have to admit that you’re grieving. It’s like being a tree with the bark stripped off or a skinned rabbit. The coup in all its parts has blown down the house of my defenses, leaving me raw and unprotected. I’m hearing the sound of fingernails on a blackboard when there is no blackboard. Many people felt this way during the covid years, but I was less affected by that historic upheaval. I mourned my losses, washed my hands and washed my hands again. But the current enemy is not microscopic and invisible. In fact, it’s grandiose, in your face and grotesquely swollen with hate and greed. I take this more personally than I did living through the pandemic. It’s as if I’m having a recurring bad dream that goes on night after night. Dangerous men in expensive suits are chasing me on dark city streets. My theory is that each of us is responding to these enormous events in the world according to personality type. For some people, it’s business as usual. In my case, I only think about it 80% of my waking hours. The rest of the time I feel fragile without thinking I’m thinking about it. It’s just the background radiation.

There seem to be generational differences. Among my contemporaries, I am not alone in my preoccupation. We were born in the shadow of the camps, the mushroom clouds. We were the children of air raid drills and the McCarthy witch hunt. We came of age during the Vietnam War and every one of us was touched by it. All of this nestles deep down in our stored consciousness and rises to the surface in the shock of recognition when we see immigrants rounded up, strongmen fawned over Chamberlain-style, people we sent to represent us in Washington folding like paper airplanes. Friends have experienced trouble eating and sleeping, eruptions on their skin, headaches. And this isn’t entirely a Coney Island of the Mind. Older people are legitimately worried about some spaceman marching in and ripping Social Security and Medicare out from under them. There is no shortage of what to worry about, what to keep us awake at night and, as my loved ones in the next generation remind me, we elders have the bandwidth. We’ve got long mornings at the screen drinking coffee and long evenings after dinner. Plenty of time to contemplate our fate, the fate of the nation and the planet. One older friend tells me that he, the felon in chief, is going to kill her by stealing her benefits and cramming them into his already engorged pockets. We are the victims of a cadre of people who cannot get enough.

I’ll get over it. In fact, I feel better already. Now that I’m facing the reality that I can’t be brave all the time, I’m more able to be brave some of the time. Some days, I will entertain the usual worries of the old. My memory is failing. This hurts, that hurts. Some days, I will dwell on my rage at these thieves for trying to steal my wellbeing. But some days, I will speak out, write, call, march and generally let them know that I ain’t dead yet. As long as I’m breathing, I will be non-compliant. These are not even people I would break bread with, never mind suck up to. I will resist them when I can and when I can’t or when I feel too much despair, I will applaud the many efforts of courageous public figures and private citizens who are in the thick of it. Today, twenty-one people who worked directly for Elon Musk at DOGE resigned rather than use their technical expertise to compromise people’s private information. They got the message and they woke up, giving the rest of us one less day out of Orwell and Kafka.

Still, I cannot deny that the stench, the miasma, is creeping closer. I have seven family members who access healthcare through Medicaid. They range in age from ninety to three and they don’t deserve to be kicked to the curb to allow even larger tax cuts for the billionaire class. When I think about them, I am animated by that rage that is always crouching at the starting line, waiting for the race to begin. I know it’s there along with the despair. There will be seasons of lament, seasons of action and seasons of crabapple blossoming here in the Sierras.

**********************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.