Six weeks of hell

If unity and empathy are out the window, where are we heading?

Rattled, I dread the run-up to November.
 
Every day there is more division, whenever we turn around or check our news feed. Anxieties and dysfunction are stoked.

Last night it was dismay over the one indictment returned for the shooting of Breonna Taylor—#SayHerName—coupled with a president egging on potential armed confrontation, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. That was just one night—plus the continuing epic wildfires in the West, floods, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lying in repose. Might we expect locusts and asps next?

We are a mess. I am a mess. A multiplier effect of imbalance rages: consider the signals Mother Earth is ending us, for one.

These deviant times portend even worse ones ahead. Enough so that it is becoming harder to stay anchored by hope.   

It’s not just that we’ve strayed “off course.” I fear that that our collective moral compass itself is broken—in terms of showing empathy, and finding common ground.

For sure, this begins internally and emanates out. I feel my own contradictions. Struggling to stay mindful of ways to handle this anxiety and not get sucked in.

One tip I’ve read is to pay close attention to positive, non-threatening things you encounter. A boy playing hide and seek on a swing set with his Dad, a wanderlust-loving cat curled beside you on the couch.

I am far more vigilant in the opposite direction. Driving through town, I cringe at three heavy-duty pickup trucks in a line flying oversized American and Trump flags. It feels irrational; there is absolutely nothing wrong with them doing this.   

We are also urged to not interpret ambiguous situations as threatening. When anxious, our focused attention is more biased—perhaps reinforced during a season such as now when life has been reshuffled so capriciously.

At the local transfer station, a barefaced man near a busy recycling bin appears to roll his eyes at my facemask and me. Maybe that verges on my own paranoia, since perhaps he’s just duly fed up.

Another tip is to avoid overestimating the chances of bad things happening. And going further, not to call something a catastrophe when you actually have resources—like resilience, and experience—to deal with it.

For me, I am chilled not only by images and accounts, but also by an oversized expectation, of violent conflicts among protestors and counter-protestors. Ever since Charlottesville, and stretching back further, the prospect has sickened my stomach. In moments this feels out of whack—though in another lurch, I fear the president is setting the stage not to concede if needed and for what may happen then.

My father lives in Concord, Mass., iconic launch pad of American history and perhaps an entitled enclave of Transcendentalist-imbued liberalism. The Unitarian Universalist church he attends there braced for a weekend counter-protest, as for many months, the parish had the audacity to drape a “Black Lives Matter” banner across its large columns. I am urging him not to go.

How do we restore balance, and repair that moral compass?

Last spring, despite the relative hardships of a lockdown there were bright spots. Now as we spiral into a season of darkness, they seem like distant memories.

We felt more attuned to wildlife. A mama fox raised her three kits for a while under a nearby shed while other animals extended themselves into spaces people normally occupy. In late May, I experienced a large “swarming pine cone” of honey bees, perhaps two feet tall in a Norway Spruce. The next day they were gone.

We felt more grateful—for each other’s company and staying in contact with family. For essential workers on the front lines, even for the prospects of a unified approach to the pandemic in all of its complexity.

Currently—I don’t know about you—I am waking earlier, if not stirred by restless thoughts much of the night. I haven’t played the guitar in more than a month, being inattentive to a means of pure release and joy. I keep putting off calling old friends, a few of whom I know are on the other side of the political divide. Jog a bit less. Energy seems to flow in the wrong direction.

How do we restore balance, and repair that moral compass?

Seasoned mariners know the difference between magnetic variation and deviation. Variation, the angle between true north and magnetic north (or more precisely, the horizontal trace of the magnetic field), requires a simple plotting adjustment to keep your vessel safe on its heading.

The deviation or error in a compass itself a bit more dicey. Deviation is caused by the magnetic influence of some nearby object, requiring some technical knowhow to adjust for.

Correcting for this deviation requires “internal” work. It’s akin to what feels lacking within and around us right now.

It’s becoming harder to stay anchored by hope.

Finally, with each of these accumulating layers of distress, I wonder about their compounding effect, or how that adds to our own deviation. So many norms have been scrambled. Truth has been turned upside down into alternative facts. It seems impossible to process all the angles of attack, retreat and rollbacks, coming at us.

But people can only be oppressed for so long. Others can only take a drumbeat of negativity and isolation for so long—until they must tune out, or burn out. Others are poisoned into thinking they are the victims, that their liberties are under attack, until they erupt.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked. At the end of that resonant poem, he posed:

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

 
Where are we headed?