I am struggling.
Everything seems to be collapsing all around us. Our leaders are feckless and timid in the face of this rolling disaster, unable to stand up to the rising tide of darkness, hatred and ignorance.
Our courts are bereft of the moral authority they once carried, hollowed out by years and years of attacks and subversion, now active participants in the decline.
Violence stalks our land, made manifest in an eyeblink at a Pennsylvania farm, and dark storm clouds are gathering on the horizon, threats to both our liberty and safety.
And it just keeps getting worse. It’s a fitting background for an epic fantasy tale, if only it all weren’t so frighteningly real.
And so I seek solace, safety from the tempest, a place to anchor myself and my thoughts.
When I was a little boy, my father took me to the school just down the block from our modest rental house to fly a kite on a windy day. I don’t remember much about it, other than that there was a big dog on the playground. I went to pet it, and it snarled and bit my cheek.
My dad rushed me to the emergency room. They laid me down on this foam bed – I can still remember them putting soft restraints over my arms to keep me from moving while they sewed up my cheek. And my father stood next to me – a reassuring presence in a world gone mad.
I’d lived around dogs my whole life. I didn’t understand how it had happened. How could one of them do something like this to me?
I often return to that memory when trying to calm myself down. The reassuring feel of the soft safety restraints, the presence of my father.
These days, when I’m feeling this way, I also play one of my favorite comforting songs, All is Not Lost, by the Brilliance, when I need to remind myself that there must still be hope:
All is not lost, Is not lost, Mm-mm
The pain of life
I know it well
It knows me well
The road to peace
I know is hell
I know it well.
I’ve known this country all my life. It’s been my home, my pride, my birthright. How could it do something like this to me, to us?
And yet, the song is right. Though things are darker now than at any previous moment in my life, all is not lost. We still have a functioning democratic system, for now. We can choose to exercise our rights to keep it.
We have the power to change our own fate, come November. To assert that this is our country too.
It doesn’t have to be like this. And I’m sure my father agrees.