This post was composed from a place of visceral reaction + balanced and unbalanced reasoning. Triggers forthcoming.
Sickness is a fact of life. I see sickness plague people I love and people I don’t. The worst part of being sick is that moment when it dawns on you that you are no longer well.
This can be the instant the paring knife breaches the skin on your thumb – oh, that’s a deep one – or that moment upon waking when you realize the scratch in your throat is not atmospheric – there goes the next two weeks.
Or it can land when you hear news that’s far more grave – and bless everyone who must endure those terrible moments. After the news, you commit to the healing, you fight, you endure. Or sometimes, sadly, you resign yourself to the unwelcome news and move forward, making the most of every moment, whether those moments are countable or not.
Hopefully.
There’s a third possibility: wallowing in the sickness. This can be voluntary or not. Sometimes – and this often occurs when you have an obvious sickness, physical, paired with one less visible, spiritual or emotional – a person feeds the sickness. Smoking like a chimney after the cancer diagnosis. Pouring scotch onto a rock-hard liver. People mistake this as a desire to die, but I believe it’s something else.
In sickness versus sickness, the heavyweight always wins.
I’ve known my country was sick for a long time. Across the tapestry of our collective community, there are pictures of apparent health and comfort, and there are pictures of grief, boiling anger, all the way to legions of festering human degradation that we drive by on the way to work, sipping green tea from an insulated mug.
There is no judgment here.
I’ve sipped that tea many times.
No judgment.
Only the tapestry and the diversity of these images are undeniable. Some things simply are. And as we hold these many true things as self-evident and coexisting, we can land on no other conclusion than that, in sum, there is illness here.
You cannot consider yourself healthy and whole if you are fit as a fiddle except for the way that the toes on your left foot are rotting away.
We all know this.
And knowing, acknowledging, and then sitting in mute befuddlement about what to do about it is normal. Feeling powerless to do anything about it and going on with other aspects of your life is normal. The serenity prayer applies to us all.
But this week something shifted.
White America, Black America, Rich America, Poor America, Right-Left-This-That-Center America — all frighteningly, universally sick.
The head spins.
The heart clenches.
Tears streak sideways.
And then stillness.
The fulcrum point was not Iryna Zarutska, and it wasn’t Charlie Kirk. The fulcrum point was the way that different factions of unwell people are rationalizing their acceptance of – or even satisfaction with – undeniable human tragedy: murder.
I see people from all of these factions shrugging smugly when they consider the fact that an individual’s life was taken from them by another individual.
Maybe it’s OK.
Maybe they had it coming.
Maybe my choir will eat this up.
I see each side saying the other side is doing it, but not us. And it doesn’t matter. No one is telling the truth.
Divide.
All divide.
Divide, divide.
I scanned the headlines and surveyed the dialogue.
I saw people I respect celebrating diatribes of justification.
What about this?
What about that?
The horror and the tragedy come not from the comparison and the whataboutism, but from the fact that all of these things are true, contemporary, and coexisting. The ultimate whatabout is this: What about the fact that we will all be dust and bone before too long, so what does it matter in the here and now?
A United States that is living up to its promise could handle the rhetoric of Charlie Kirk. It could handle the current administration’s attempt to strip away guardrails and safety nets. It could resist corporate greed in the name of human decency. It could reduce suffering to a minimum. But before I stray into something that could be branded this political point of view or that, let me stop.
Because that brand is a firebrand that people are jamming into cool flesh and if you don’t let it burn all the way down to bone, then you’re part of the problem.
Keep your fucking brand away from me.
The point is, America is not living up to its promise. That promise is no more substantial than the agitprop rotting in the sewers of Moscow.
There’s far too much anger and grief and people just don’t know how to move through it, so they cling to it with entitlement and righteousness because that’s a better sell. It looks better on a banner. It makes for a better fundraising pitch.
Like, like, follow, subscribe.
Since the dawn of our universal interconnectedness we should have sprouted a thousand MLKs, but instead we produced frauds and hucksters and a bunch of well-meaning flat tires.
Healing is so fringe.
I’ve lost my faith in social action.
Local action is all that remains, and that’s evaporating too.
No, our capacity to interact as like beings is evaporating.
Isolated examples don’t count.
Views from behind the hedgerow are disqualified.
Right now, the aerial view is all that matters.
When you go so high up that you can see it all.
The tapestry.
Like the earth-toned stamps of midwestern farmland.
Like the wrinkles of the Appalachians.
Like the scorched faces of the Superstition Mountains.
Like suburbia and the cookie-cutter projects.
Like the fringe of wildfire racing toward PCH.
The tapestry.
The proof is in the tapestry, and if you’re one of the people breaking your arm patting America on the back for all the progress we’ve made in the last 60 years or the last 160 years, look at the tapestry, it’s burning along the edges. We don’t get to claim the achievements of our forebears.
Just because the Abolitionists killed one cancer doesn’t mean we can’t die of another one.
Where would you place your bet?
If you had to.
I mean, if you really, really had to.
On the celebration of remission?
Or on the eulogy?
