Hope And Despair
You don’t need me to tell you what happened: Mine Furor once again has happened here, with a very real possibility that the Republicans, having already taken the Senate, also manage to keep control of the House, in which case in just 75 days a fully fascist government is installed across all three branches of government in the United States.
Today I went to the zoo.
For those who’ve been reading along, you know that this was no small undertaking and no small risk, since I hadn’t attempted this since August when it blew up in my face in a disastrous day of chronic fatigue, and the weeks and months since have continued to have me at this lower, shittier baseline. Nonetheless, I went to bed last night full of intent and determination to roust myself early, and get myself out the door.
November 6, you see, is Nora the polar bear’s birthday, and today marks her having traveled 5,256,000,000 miles around the sun in her nine years of polar bear life.
So, shortly after 1:00 PM, I stood with another two dozen or so as keepers and crowd, complete with guitar, serenaded her with “Happy Birthday” and she was fed a birthday cupcake. Which also is how several moments later I found myself near to tears as the crowd then sang her “You Are My Sunshine”, because sooner or later today the tears for something needed to come.
On my way to the zoo, I caught up on some podcasts. For better or for worse, that meant episode 115 of Overthink: “Hope”, recorded and posted before the election. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I maybe should have gotten to this one beforehand rather than afterward, but the alternative would have been episode 116, “Extinction”. It’s possible I faded in an out, all things considered, but in all the talk of Pandora’s infamous box and cancer treatment studies where participants indicated that just the off-chance a new drug could cure them fed their hopes to keep fighting, I’m not sure they much addressed the prospect of where you find hope when your hopes once again have been dashed upon the rocks of reality, and the risk is real that a good number of democratic doors are about to be forcefully slammed shut in just a short but interminable two and a half months.
I mean, we can’t just give up on hope, right? Those words I type here fully aware that my nominal caste won’t necessarily protect me if, as Elon Musk’s mother says, he intends to “get rid of people who are not working or don’t have a job” from the federal budget—because there goes SNAP, and there goes Medicaid. Caste will continue to provide a buffer—and let me be careful and sure here to recognize that others are far, far more immediately at risk than I—but it remains an open question if that buffer only delays the inevitable.
Quite randomly enough, my transit listening was bookended on the return trip by having put Yeah Yeah Yeahs on shuffle, and being greeted first thing by “Despair” (or acoustic, if you prefer), because in this most bafflingest of timelines from which we still have not escaped, why wouldn’t my day travel the arc between hope and despair?
The other day, social was exploding with exasperation and anger at an Ohio rabbi who lectured that we needed to have compassion for the supporters of whomever the losing candidate turned out to be, because “nearly half the country will experience what they consider a disaster”. The exasperation and anger was natural enough, as the entire point is that we do have compassion and empathy for them. Our policies are all about giving them as well as us better education, and health care, and protections from falling through the cracks of society, and any number of things that truly would do right by everybody. Their policies are about caste allegiance and anger and violence, be it physical or otherwise.
Karen O, then, gets the last word.
Through the darkness and the light
Some sun has gotta riseMy sun is your sun
My sun is your sun
My sun is your sun
My sun is your sunTheir sun is our sun
Their sun is our sun
Their sun is our sun
Their sun is our sunSome sun has gotta rise