Tough Days
I usually write about the state of the country, but today is a personal post.
Yesterday was a tough day. There's a lot of stuff I don't talk about online, because it's just too damn complicated. But it was a tough day.
I ended up dealing with it by putting on the good summer sun dress, bringing an assortment of sandals and a swimsuit, and taking off in the Jeep for something. I wasn't sure what. The pool is only open through Labor Day, so that was an option. Or maybe an old gravel pit I used to work at, where people swim? Because that's the kind of thing we do in Iowa.
But I needed people, too. There are a whole lot of people online who help me get through really tough stuff. People I've met online helped me get through the tough day yesterday in different ways. Sometimes it doesn't matter where we know people from. The connections are wicked powerful. We need them.
It reminds me over and over the power of connection. Why we need community. So much of why this country is broken and hurting and getting worse.
We've lost our center of gravity.
Can we survive floating around without it... like what we're doing?
In the midst of a culture war?
Where meanness is celebrated, and stealing critical high-level national security secrets is dismissed as equivalent to not returning overdue library books?
We need people.
Yet our connections have been torn and damaged. Torn asunder, to be poetic about it.
Mine have. I don't know about yours.
So many people and years of history have fallen away. They're just gone. Because of all the things. The pandemic. Intolerance. Meanness. Bigotry. Willful injury or exposure to a virus. A refusal to take care of humans. Indifference. Apathy. Privilege. All of that.
We're drifting.
Are we drifting because our social fabric is so threadbare that we don't have the wherewithal to knit new tapestries?
Or because we don't want to weave new stuff because we don't know if our own neighbors are of the hateful variety, or the inclusive variety, or the apathetic variety, or some other variety? There are a zillion.
I mean it could be all the things.
One of the people I talked to today recognized that what I'm dealing with is a deep wound.
But when I sit and think about it, maybe it's a thousand paper cuts on top of a bunch of deep wounds.
Maybe it's knowing that government agencies are getting increasingly corrupted.
Our state is running public health ads on TV about problems that almost never actually happen, while our state government continues to force schools to be open with no covid mitigation measures in place. Florida is actively arresting people who just tried to register to vote and to do it properly. Women in state after state run the risk of being charged with felonies if god forbid they get pregnant and have to terminate it for whatever reason.
Maybe it's not a thousand paper cuts. Maybe it's a thousand deep wounds. Could be that, too.
In the end, I'm okay. I'm just freaking tired of being resilient. I'm tired of fighting to do the right thing while I watch a whole lot of the people around me not take the threats facing us seriously.
As I flipped through the channels last night, I saw a 9/11 special on. Great. Like I want to watch that.
But this moment that we're in is like the time after 9/11, when some people decided to go all out to do something about it... and some people just eventually went about their everyday lives like everything was fine.
I remember riding on the subway in DC several years and a couple of new wars after 9/11 with two new, young veterans nearby. They were pissed that most of society seemed to not give a sh*t about what they had been at war for.
I don't remember if I said something or not. I don't remember if I said to them that they were not alone, even as our train passed right by the Pentagon.
I don't think I probably did. It's not quite the same thing to give up your career in big wildfire management to haul yourself to DC to work in homeland security. Nothing like going to war.
Not that I didn't come close to that myself, but it wasn't the right path. The work I ended up doing was anchored to wildfire in a way that going to war would not have been for me. And I learned to anchor and flank to be effective.
Which is probably part of why I feel discombobulated now. Some days I feel pretty anchored. Today is not one of them. Neither was yesterday.
Today I feel untethered... like so many millions of us up in this country.
No center of gravity. No shared vision for the future that we're all on board with. Or even a majority.
Fear. We do have a hell of a lot of fear. That's not an anchoring type of thing, though.
I did end up in a river valley yesterday, as seen in the picture. That helped. Good to get some outside time in.
It's otherwise been a summer of paperwork and hoop-jumping and putting pieces and parts in place for something that is weeks and weeks behind where I wanted it to be.
But still. I ended up in a river valley today. It helped.
It's a pivot point of a weekend.
Not just for me, but for the whole culture. What will we do this fall? So many of us want to know how this is going to turn out.
I think we're going to have to work our keisters off just to keep things stable-ish. That's what I think.
I think we might get much more of a look at how much rougher things can get as well. I think more people will be getting more of a sense of what's at stake in this country, and on this planet.
Whether that's before or after we can still do something about any of it I don't yet know.
It would be nice if I was wrong about that. I would be pretty thrilled to be wrong. But I don't think that's what we're doing.
Anyway. Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening to me process.
Honestly, I would love to live in denial myself... like so many are. I feel like it would be a whole lot more pleasant than living in my own brain. But I happened to get a risk management brain. So here we are.
Keep the faith, in this democracy and in the many good people who are taking the threats to it seriously. There are hundreds of thousands of us, if not millions.
We need to help each other through. Thank you for helping me.
Be safe and be well this weekend.
Rest up.
We have shift to do.