Before the storms last Saturday I took a cup of coffee out to the porch where I listened to a large convocation of finches meeting in the trees. They talked long and loudly, not fighting, but deciding something. Periodically one would come out to a feeder, fill up, re-enter and join the discussion. I listened until I was chilled, my cup was empty, and I felt strong enough to turn on the television.
Newscasters: short pieces of wars and threats, of cruelty, of demolished cities, of children afraid to go to school because they could be taken from the streets, of lies and distortions. These are new times, difficult times. I want to understand the how and why, no easier than translating the language of the finches.
I believe we will find a new sanity: we cannot discard the centuries that have produced a working democracy to replace it with of a few months of greed coupled with amorality. I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s argument for the banality of evil. Trumpian behavior is not evil as much as it is a moral injury, a man who gave up thinking in favor of clichés in a desperate desire for a version of success. He surrounds himself with golden baubles and sycophants, protections from knowing the contempt he is held in throughout the country. Not only can we not believe in him, we cannot believe him: did he set up the recent shooting as argument for the ballroom he insists on? Another desperate lie? Could be.
Nowhere in history is there an example of a leader who has forced the long-term love and respect of the people. Obedience? Yes. Fear? Yes. Quiescence? Yes. For awhile… only awhile. Then, change.
We will return to the country we love, perhaps wiser. Like everyone else, I must maintain my old self full of hope, of belief, and of gratitude for the life I’ve had and for the people around me.
This morning I awakened with songs of John Denver carried from some dream into the sweet morning air and snuggled into the lyrics of “Poems, Prayers, and Promises.” I first heard this song when I lived in Montana on the east shore of Flathead Lake and taught 10th grade English at Big Fork High School. Life was much simpler. I had returned from my first summer in Israel with the Smithsonian digging at Tell Jemmah. I was tanned, strong, young, full of optimism. The fall air was mountain brisk and each night I watched the sun set long across the lake, brilliant before it disappeared behind the west shore hills. I loved my life.
One evening at the Pine Cone Café, just north of town under tall ponderosas, where I had been asked to talk about my summer in Israel and I was so full of myself I could have talked all night, I heard this song that even yet comforts my soul.
How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care.
I am not longer quite so full of myself, I no longer teach in classrooms, but I learn every day that I can maintain my belief in goodness, that I am right to care, that I can be startled by kind gestures that are the poetry of any moment.
Elie Wiesel , a man who survived concentration camps, said that the one thing that cannot be taken from us is how we respond to an event, any event, no matter how horrendous. Belief, optimism, kindness, love, votes… we the people, we are still here, strong and ready for the future.
“Poems, prayers, promises, the things we believe in.”