Feeling Blue

Depression has built up like a block of ice in my gut.  I can’t sleep.  I’ve been tossing around in bed for a couple hours, and I’ve finally gotten up to face the computer and to write this for my blog.  It may be the last piece I post here.

I don’t think that before now I ever sat down to consider in any specific way how I feel about being an American.  I knew I liked it, sure, but I never did an Elizabeth Barrett Browning number about the USA: “How do I love thee, let me count the ways.”  I lived America, though.  I once spent most of a year in a white Carry-all named Moby Dick, driving all over it, even rolling through a lot of Mexico and a bit of Canada. I started in Maine and saw the faces on Mt. Rushmore, the bison in Wyoming, the lovely wild Baja Peninsula, a bullfight in Mexico City – from sea to shining sea.  Then during the summer of the Bicentennial I rode a ten-speed bicycle from one of those same seas to the other.  I knew I was free in this country.  This was America. I loved being here.

In America I have taught in five different high schools and one college, working with many delightful young people in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont.  As I crossed and recrossed the country, I met scores of kind men and women and saw all of that beautiful landscape – the mountains, the prairies, the lakes and rivers.  After I pedaled across the Mississippi, I turned down under the bridge and took a swim in the Big Muddy.  I loved seeing my land.  However, as I think now, even more it was the fearless, open-handed generosity of America’s people that buoyed my spirit, that touched my heart.

Before now I’ve never felt that America might lose that generosity.  But it seems today that it could.  The events since the election feel to me like the beginning of the end of days.  The executive order to build a wall against Mexico; I remember rejoicing when the one in Berlin came down.  The slamming of the door on all those refugees; didn’t the Statue say, “Send me your poor…”?  Torture is now a fine idea; I was so pleased when our last president renounced it.  And I read stories of mosques being burned, of swastikas being painted on synagogues.  I sense that various yahoos feel that this country is becoming a place where bigotry and hatred is altogether common.  The stranger — and I was one as I traveled around this wonderful country – today grows less welcome, more threatening.

I think of the people readying to run the show.  So rich, all of them.  With such a meretricious, unscrupulous man at the helm.  We tried trickle-down economics, remember?  And whatever trickled down to us, it wasn’t money.  And soon it won’t be health care.  It may not be social security, at least as we know it.  We are the poor hens, who have invited a group of wealthy foxes into the henhouse to govern us.  Who knows what they pay in taxes?  We may eke out survival, but the riches will go to the leaders, not to us. They will emerge from their positions wealthier beyond all measure.

I’d like to be reassured by the Tweets coming from the executive orderer.  But at least half of everything that he and his mouthpieces say are lies.  Lies, plain and simple.   When Kellyanne Conway tells us that the president is presenting “alternative facts” about the size of his inauguration, say, how can I take her – or him – seriously? When Sean Spicer explains that only 109 people were detained, and Homeland Security reports nearly 350, whom are we to believe? The interim Attorney General has “betrayed us” by giving the president her considered advice that what he is doing is unconstitutional. Consequently, she must be fired. The new administration clearly has utter contempt for the Constitution – and for the truth.

In short, the country is being guided by an Id, by an embodiment of that part of the psyche unfettered by reason or restraint.  Captain Caliban stands on the bridge, ignoring the navigators, spinning the wheel this way and that, full speed ahead, running the ship heedlessly toward reef or storm, and blasting out tweets that these course changes will keep us passengers safe.

They won’t.  It all seems hopeless to me.  Congress will not help us either; too many of them have deserted their principles for political expediency.  John McCain is one of the few who seems to have the strength to oppose at least some of the madness from his party.  But he must feel lonely.

Anyhow, the result of all this is that I feel incapable of writing anything more. For some of you, this may be a relief, although I’ve never held a gun to anyone’s head and told them to read my stuff.  This piece will shut down my blog for the foreseeable future.  I’ve tried (not always successfully) to write something each month or so.  Until something brightens the horizon – and I can’t see that happening anytime soon – I won’t pester anyone with my words here anymore.  And I’m withdrawing from Facebook, too.  It’s all too depressing.  Whether I agree or disagree with your politics, they upset me either way.  If anyone wants to tell me anything, I can be reached at johnagouldv@gmail.com.  I’ll write back, and I won’t be mean.  Maybe sad, never mean.