Am I Well-Adjusted or In Denial

Or Maybe I’m just a Sociopath?

If anything, I feel this is more relevant than ever. With the possibility of The Big One taking us all out hovering on the edges of our consciousness and a real chance of yet another surge of our friend, the Virus, I can’t understand why I’m sleeping just fine. I’ve got new aches and pains. My partner is going for surgery soon. If I’m in mental, emotional, and/or spiritual turmoil my powers of denial are undeniably impressive. Updated 3/28/22

Right, I hear it. I hear it. The “good guy” won. That creepy guy we all hate lost. Except for the 70,000,000 who voted for him, that is. Now the creepy guy won’t concede to losing and it’s tantrum time again in the White House.

New infections in the United States are at all-time record highs but that’s below-the-fold news right now. Don’t even bother asking how many people are newly unemployed or are being evicted. That’s not the real news of the day. And Europe? Who cares? Oh, and in case anyone not on the west coast was wondering: yes, California is still on fire.

I get texts throughout the day — and night — from freaked out friends asking what they should do about their anxiety.

I’m the expert?

My belly button hurts where a surgeon pulled my gallbladder out of my body last Friday, so that’s more on my mind than this inane election (Worse, the incision with the stitch in it by my belly button has suddenly begun leaking this clear, pinkish goo that the nurse I called in a panic assures me is totally normal).

But even before that, the best I could muster around the entire enterprise has been a shrug. It’s all a massive farce orchestrated by a bunch of old white people to maintain a wobbly, unsustainable power structure.

Am I filled with outrage? Have I taken to social media with righteous fury? Do I inundate my friends with diatribes about how we actually had a candidate who spoke to the real problems besetting the electorate and twice watched that candidate get side-lined?

Yeah, right.

I was once filled with righteous fury. When I was sixteen and couldn’t get a straight answer about the war in Vietnam, that lit a fire in me. The fire smoldered for decades while I went down a series of really nasty rabbit holes but all it took was that crap about Shock and Awe to relight my fury. Coming out of the wilderness of selfishness and addiction, I stoked my fire. I educated myself and threw my lot in with those wacky Medicare for All-ers.

Yes, I’m saying it here in front of God and everyone: I am a Bernie Bro.

I do believe that health care, adequate shelter, decent education that comes without 12 years (and counting) of repayment of student debt, and good jobs are what will turn this country around. An educated electorate that understands it has a stake in how things happen in government is actually desirable. And I believe that a power structure that has shockingly ignored and even undermined these goals has only itself to blame for where we are now.

So, yes, I did my marching and my phone banking and my canvassing and my proselytizing on street corners next to card tables filled with campaign literature. I was that person.

Am I still?

Maybe. But I don’t feel the fire anymore. My sense of urgency is more abstract. I worked with some passionate, committed, driven young people and I hope they’re still on fire in spite of being basically ignored and derided for their efforts. If not, we’re screwed. We might be anyway.

Fellow-observer-of-human-foibles and brilliant writer, Aimée Gramblin, has been musing on our uniquely screwed up and largely unearned place at the top of the pecking order on the planet lately.

To paraphrase her and Yuval Noah Harari, these big brains of ours catapulted us to the top of the game long before evolution had prepared us for the role. As a result, the most powerful animal on Earth is petty, fear-driven, and a total greedy guts.

The soap opera being played out in Washington, DC now is nothing new. Let me Google Herbert Hoover for you. It’s not even as if this upstart country invented the kind of power struggle that has pundits panting in front of their keyboards. As our friend, Yuval, will tell you we’ve been doing this dance at least since some genius figured out how to stick a seed in the ground and harvest dinner.

So forgive my lack of interest

Or don’t. It’s all the same to me. And, yes you’re absolutely right to tell me to check my privilege. Done. I’m not bullet-proof but being an old white lady without kids in the deepest blue city on the electoral map does mean I have the option of shrugging. I’m shrugging.

This isn’t to say that I don’t and won’t throw my efforts behind the progressives. I’ll donate (once I have money to donate again) and volunteer (once my poor beat-up body forgives me for the outrage done it last week) and use my words (like I’m doing now).

But I won’t lie awake nights, clenched in anxiety and fury. I won’t hunker down with like-minded friends in a frenzy of “what do we do now’s?”. I won’t reach out to any potential across-the-aislers I might know to try and understand their position. I don’t care. Anyone who willingly supports the Republicans and the Republican-lites (aka the Democrats) is welcome to the kind of world those liars and thieves are cooking up.

Whatever I am, well-adjusted, or in denial, or an outright mental defective, I’m paying attention. I’m listening. I’m here for those around me, even the ones who text at 4am having panic attacks about the creepy guy not leaving the White House. If I’m awake that is. Because it turns out that the upside of being an outright mental defective is that I sleep really well these days.

Go figure.

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