One More Morning In America

A morning like this, a morning on which you will not truly wake up, but rather go through the habitual motions of waking up –brush your teeth, shower, change your clothes, walk the dog, and go off in the usual stupor to work– you’re left wrestling with the old, hard-wired reactions to nights like the one now behind you.

All night you heard ridiculous phrases like “the tide of history” and “the winds of change.” You understand, even if you cannot reconcile, the cyclical nature of politics and public opinion. Waves break on the beach and roll back out to sea. Stuff always gets washed up and left behind. The moon works its reliable and spectacular magic and the sun comes up in the east.

Still, you hope and you doubt. A morning like this you like to think your world has been transformed, that things will be somehow different, if only in terms of a heightened sense of solidarity and shared values (which would be no small victory, really); yet you know that whatever actual changes might result from our collective yawp into the void of representative democracy will likely be small, incremental, and subject, as all such changes are, to swift and arbitrary reversal.

Meanwhile, some things seem both inevitable and irreversible, things like enchantment and disenchantment, which somehow manage to eternally coexist in their inevitability and irreversibility. The former a blessing that comes with simply being alive in this world; the latter an affliction that unfortunately also comes with simply –or not so simply– being alive in this world.

If your little red “I Voted” sticker is some acknowledgement of a small and utterly painless investment in faith, what exactly is the nature of your investment? What is the nature of that faith? And what sort of return, if any, do you expect to earn on that investment?

You’re not so sure, really. Maybe it ultimately boils down to little more than a feeling, a hope, a sneaking suspicion that this country might still work, might still be a better, more compassionate, more peaceful place. Or at the very least that it might one day soon make more sense.

Maybe whatever happened last night just means that you, along with millions of other people, are exhausted by a political and cultural climate of virulent dishonesty, a strain of dishonesty so fierce and prevalent that you no longer feel safe in your own skin, and can no longer trust the words that are lobbed in your direction every day, or even the words that tumble around in your own head and roll off your tongue.

This, however, is another day, another pure opportunity to be stunned. The first bruise of sunlight is creeping behind the houses across the alley. Does the world this morning feel like a better or safer place? Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, and can’t answer that question with any real honesty or perspective.

You know this much: When you drive downtown the hobbled parade of scrap metal entrepreneurs will still be pushing their grocery carts slowly along the streets around your office, and your desk will be exactly as you left it yesterday afternoon.