DISASSEMBLING No. 5

A Personal Reckoning in a Time of National Unraveling

The America I know, the America I am familiar with, I am comfortable with is being taken apart one pillar, one institution at a time. This morning I woke up to hear the president, by way of an executive order, is going to dismantle the department of education after already firing thousands of DOE staff. He is deporting immigrants and first generation Americans so fast that many good people are being deported to Central American prisons who are not the promised criminals and gang members only. His misguided efforts to equalize trade are causing prices to skyrocket and the stock market a. k. a my retirement, to plunge. For  as long as I can remember we have been asking for government reform, immigration reform and management of wasteful government spending. Now it’s here and I am stupefied, mortified and a whole host of other adjectives I can’t come up with at the moment.

The only anecdote I can sarcastically muster is “careful what you ask for.” I’m in the middle of my living room, staring at the news as a cold numbness of disbelief comes over me and the blood drains from my heart. There are talks of enacting the alien insurrection act, martial law and severe inflation, all just 10 years before I can retire. When I was in my 30’s, stock market free falls and political hanky panky didn’t stop me in my tracks. The pandemic would have but I had a job to do and I did it well and not without damage to my psyche. But I had time. I had time to rebuild my 401k, time to make it through that particular presidential term,  survive any political fallout and time to go to therapy. 

   Now I’m yelling at the TV, “no! not like this! Never like this. It was never supposed to be like this.” Again I am reminded, careful what you ask for. 

   I think there is a place in our emotional beings, a purgatory of sorts, a sterile waiting area at which we arrive before plunging into the darkness of emotional destitution. In this place and for a moment, if even just a split second, there is nothing. No anger, no fear, no sadness, and no confusion; just nothing. And in that brief moment of time I got to pause the swirl long enough to wonder what if all that I am so comfortable with is just because it is so familiar. What if I cannot recognize the error of our current ways because the change is so painful or because it’s been this way for so long it has grown on me in a covert and insidious manner. The taste of beer grew on me despite it’s bitterness, the rampant alcoholism in my family and the proven harmful effects of even just one beer a day so maybe our current climate grew on me too.

I think we will settle into some kind of new normal and a prickly comfort will converge upon the masses. There will always be a few that live their lives knowing this a constructed reality. Every time I experience a deja vú I am reminded of the construct, the matrix in which I live out my days. But I don’t want to be faced with an either or scenario. I don’t want to have to choose because choosing either the red or the blue [pill] is still choosing a script. I want to walk out my door and go as far as I can until I punch a hole in the primordial membrane that surrounds our shared story and walk out. The problem I foresee is that I’ll just walk off one stage onto another much like Truman of the The Truman Show. He walked off the set and onto a much bigger one, the stage we collectively call life. Sounds bleak, I know. It means, for myself anyway, choosing a much smaller universe; the one between my ears or the one within the four walls of my house minus the TV. But back to our current situation…

Many of our systems are arguably and ostensibly outdated. And it is hard to build something new on a cracked, ne, flawed foundation; but do we have to blow it up? If the rebuilding comes from a flawed place, the fixtures may be new, the flooring and walls may be new but isn’t it still flawed?. There is usefulness in some of the old machine and in the famous words of Johnny 5, “no disassemble number 5!”

https://youtu.be/WjeptaI2T8E?si=rwYotg8RmmYCsJxe