Living History

 The state of the union is...tired.  It's overwrought, cold and hungry, and irascible.  We're moving into the second year of "lockdown" and many good Americans don't want to be told what to do anymore.  No matter their health, or the health of other people.  They fret and whine about their "freedom." Yet they are the first to remind me and my ilk that "freedom isn't free."  They want it both ways, but that is not on the menu.

Our cities are dotted with homeless camps, shuttered shops, and crumbling infrastructure.  The Congress has a few members who openly advocate political assassination and call themselves "patriots," yet they can't seem to summon the courage to support the impeachment of a president who openly called for insurrection and even promised to join the mob.  He openly lied for 4 years and then warned his supporters that they needed to "take back the country."  Will they continue to fight for it?  Are we our own enemy?  Do they really know what they are getting themselves into? 

The openly fatigued populace would rather just forget.  They deaden themselves daily anyway, what's another item on the list to avoid.  The evidence is omnipresent.  Alcohol, recreational drugs, addictive drugs, pain killers, and paraphernalia abound.  Abound on the ground.  All around.  The town. Count the number of TV commercials for pharmaceuticals each evening.  Try to get the advertising jingle out of your head the next day.  Listen to the fast-talking pitchman speed-read the warnings that accompany each package.

Yet we persevere.  We photograph the beauty that surrounds us and hear the music and taste the food of many cultures nearby.  Just yesterday I photographed a tree stump with a breathtaking array of mushrooms growing from the cracks and layers.  Somehow, amid the complaints and sour dispositions of our fellow beings comes a new appreciation for what we do have and the life we may yet regain.  Does a glass of wine suddenly taste better? How about a cup of coffee?  

We need to be reminded that we are living history these days.  People will ask us in the days yet to come, how it was.  How we got by, kept optimistic, or if we did.  They'll want to know what we saw, how our lives changed, and what consequences remain.  

We will live a record. 

Once Upon A Window.

 Sometime in the late 1950s, I went with my family, including an aunt and uncle to Disneyland.  It had only been open a few years and was the object of lust for every kid I knew.  With the exception of two brothers in my neighborhood, whose father worked for Technicolor and secured industry passes on opening day for them, I knew very few other kids who had been.  Because I had an East Coast uncle who was in the media, we received will-call passes and 10 books of tickets, including two of the coveted E-tickets.  

Sitting in the horse-drawn streetcar at the end of Main street, my Aunt Dorothy and I began to chat.  She made a joke or two about not sitting too close to the horse's behind.  From that, we soon were discussing all the changes in transportation over the last century.  From horse-drawn vehicles to cars,  dirt roads to freeways even paved streets, and sidewalks.  To myself, I began to wonder how many things that no longer exist my Aunt must have seen in her lifetime.

I apply this thinking to my own life now.  Along with transportation, we must add all the changes in the way people communicate now.  It's difficult for young people today to imagine a life without computers and cell phones.  It is not uncommon during a class discussion on literature for a well-intentioned 16-year-old to ask, "why didn't he/she just use their cell phone and call for help.  The frame of reference just isn't there.  

Sometimes I marvel at the thought of going to college and grad school using only a typewriter.  I taught almost 20 of my 34 years in the classroom without a computer.  Although the experience is lost on those born after 1995 or so, it still amazes me.  

All manner of media is very different than 25 years ago.  From digital photography to streaming movies at home, our social history is rife with the impact of these changes.  

A couple of years ago, my niece's oldest child, about 12 years old at the time went with me on an ice-cream run.  She was overjoyed to sit in the cab of my pick-up.  Wanting to roll down the passenger side window a bit, she was soon puzzled.  "Where's the button to press?" she asked.

"There is none," I responded.  

"We'', how do you get the window down?"

"Watch," I said.  Then proceed to reach over and turn the little hand crank.

"Wow, that's so cool," she said, never having seen a window go down this way.  I explained that it's been done that way for decades.

Beginning or End?

 Millions of words are forming sentences about this moment in time.  Formed by minds that occupy every slot on the political spectrum.  Formed right now and throughout the day.  Millions of words from millions of people trying to separate the mythology from the facts, the delusion from reality, the lies from the truth.  

Our Capital attacked, we seek to unpack the events and the mindset of those who would commit insurrection.  Those who did commit insurrection on January 6, 2021.  The President sits in the White House today with the flag flying atop the pole, while all over the iconic buildings and monuments of Washington D.C. the flag flies at half staff.  Perhaps, that says it all.  Who and what has died?

This is what the millions are unbraiding as we ready ourselves for the transfer of power slated to take place in 12 days.  The behavior displayed by Trump's army in seeking to overturn the election results was repugnant on every level.  That those ripping and tearing the fabric of our government were in earnest is clear.  They swallowed some pretty big lies and choked them down.  They regurgitated wrath, their self-righteous ire. They felt justified to defile what they considered their "house," their "rights" their ability to trample the rule of law.  5 people died before this infamy ended.  

So, what have we learned?  What can we agree on, all of us?  Not much, apparently.   The reality show of Trump productions ended its run with all the finality of a series-ending episode of The Sopranos. 

Here's what I know to be true.  The President is a sociopath.  He checks all the boxes and this final chapter underscores all of them.  Listen to his words, look at his disposition, record his behavior.  It's clear.

People don't share the same factual information anymore.  This recent phenomenon lies at the root of the problem.  If it remains untended, more hate and misinformation will fuel similar uprisings.

Bipartisanship must be nourished.  There is so much work to do to fix what has been trashed that the sooner the better the rehabilitation can begin.

People must be held accountable for their actions and their lieing.  That the propagation of outright lies is responsible for much of this terror is certain.  Trump's lies and fascination with conspiracies were visible from the beginning.  His "birther" crusade told us all we needed to know.

We must be careful about the mental state of anyone running for any position of leadership.  Any review of Donald Trump's rise to power will reveal outright racism, duplicity, and surprising ignorance about the history of the country he once led.  We could all use a review lesson on values clarification.  

So, we ask, is this the beginning or the end of something bigger? 

Wrong People, Wrong Dreams

 Did you ever wonder who is living in the house where you spent the first couple of decades of your life?  Occasionally we get the chance to drive by a former home.  Always a little eerie? No?  I once looked at my childhood home over Google Maps.  Looking at the color of the house, the yard, and the surrounding homes on the street, it soon became obvious that my former home did not exist.  Inside our heads, they do exist, of course.  But who is walking those halls now?  What kids are spending a sleepless Christmas eve now?  Are all the fruit trees my family planted gone?  What about the Chinese Elm that my grandfather planted in that backyard?  I can't even imagine what our garage looks like.  Oh yeah, it's no longer our garage.

There is a line regarding Arthur Miller's masterpiece, "Death of a Salesman" where Miller,  in a preface to the play looks at the home of the Loman family with hindsight.  He says something like look at that home now, it's still there, but "the wrong people are in the halls."  That line has been tugging at me as I watch the attempted coup taking place in this country by a thoroughly corrupt President.  The wrong people are in the halls of power.

What Donald Trump once referred to as "all the best people" turned out to be just the opposite.  This is often the case with him.  He had the worst possible picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, and so on and so on.  If he had tried to appoint the worst possible people for various federal jobs, he could not have done any better.  Trump projects.  He's consistent on that.  What he says and does is actually the opposite of the truth.  It's the, "It's not me, it's you" behavior that psychologists call the defense mechanism of PROJECTION.  It's the screaming man shouting at the top of his lungs, "Excited, I'm not excited, you're excited."  We've all been on both ends of this behavior.

So now it is 2021 and there really is a new kid on the block.  He's not a kid and the block has only one house, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  But the halls will have new people walking around.  

As I write this, a new recording has just surfaced of the outgoing President doing another imitation of a mafioso Don.  He's verbally twisting the arm of an election official, repeating lies, and threatening this Secretary of the state of Georgia to "find" some more votes because "we won the election, and it's not fair for them to take it away like this."  Outrageous yes, but more than that, sociopathology in the raw.

Late in Miller's Salesman during Willy Loman's funeral, as part of the requiem, Biff Loman, one of Willy's sons says, "He had the wrong dreams, wrong, all, all wrong."  It's an epiphany for Biff, but the other son Happy disagrees and retaliates, "It's the only dream you can have, to come out number one."  But at what cost.  The dreams, like the people walking the halls were always all wrong.  All wrong.