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Where He's Calling From

With thanks to Ed Koenig and Stephanie Stone for permission to use this image from a march down Fifth Avenue to protest Trump's immigration policies  on 6/30/2018. I snapped this now historic photo. ©Carol Bergman

 

 

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at the wrong done to him.  

 

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

 

 

Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us."

 

-George Saunders,  Lincoln in the Bardo

 

 

 

And he blusters and he bloviates upon the stage, about the imagined and/or exaggerated slights and grievances, for the sky is falling upon the heads of the righteous, in  particular The Great Leader's now second-in-command reading from a teleprompter. And next to him, dressed in the most expensive fashion of the day. is his helpmate, silent as the lambs in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, and even more obedient despite her elite education. For this is a gathering of the mighty, the beautiful, the elected and the selected, spinning fictions known as inspirational stories. And they will form a new congregation of the elected and selected and they will be fruitful and multiply for they will attempt a total abortion ban, and the Comstock restriction on birth control, catapulting all of us back to the mid-19th century, particularly women, the helpmates in this new Gilead.

 

So be it. A gathering of the righteous, a celebration of the backwardness and moral bankruptcy of what is still known as the "Republican Party." How Abe Lincoln must be curling in his grave. For, dear reader, it certainly feels as though we have been fighting a mostly bloodless civil war, which is to say, there has been plenty of violence and threat of violence, and rage and hatred, and now yet another assassination attempt in a county in a country saturated in the poison of gun culture. 

 

It has not yet happened to me, to us, as George Saunders wrote in his prize-winning book, Lincoln in the Bardo. Not yet. But everything has changed since Trump arrived, as those of us not of the congregation—or  "the movement," as he calls it—are mouthing platitudes about "democracy," or going on extended vacations from "the news."  There are echoes in our history, many of them, but never has such a fascist impulse been so close to realization as so many of us turn away in despair.

Are we too torn up, too paralyzed with fear to think straight? Are we so glued to the news cycle, our scrolling screens, and the safety of our homes to participate in voter registration  and/or protests?

 

About 158.4 million Americans voted in the 2020 election, according to the Pew Research Center, amounting to 62.8% of people of voting age. This may sound like a big-enough number, but it is not. The United States, a democracy, ranks 31st in voter turnout in the world. In the world, dear reader. And are we not, ostensibly, the designated and/or self-designated leaders of the free world? 

 

I record here, the one small action I performed last week after I read those pitiful statistics, for none of us alone can stop the juggernaut, but together, maybe there is hope. I got into my car and  picked up voter registration forms at the post office. There are a few 20-somethings in my orbit I talk with every day—at the gym, at the local café, in the health store. I put on my educator's hat and ask them about their issues—student loans, no medical insurance—acknowledging  their daily struggles as I struggle, patiently, to pierce their apathy and inertia with my heartfelt concern, and then ask if they intend to vote.

 

 

I challenge my readers to leave a comment here with their suggestions. Let us brainstorm together. I will give a prize to anyone who can identify the literary allusion in the title, though I am not sure what the prize will be.

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