Getting older is a bitch. I’ve known this intellectually for decades – how could I not given my chosen career path? But I’ve gotten to the age where it’s becoming more of a personal and less of a theoretical battle. In the last week, I’ve had a new pain in the right hip, worse with weight bearing, which is likely more arthritis acting up, another set of steroid shots in my cervical nerve roots in an attempt to get my left shoulder girdle muscle spasms to quit taking over my life and, to top it all off, I came down with something yesterday that knocked me off my feet by late afternoon with general malaise and various wonkiness. I did what I usually do. I put on my woolies, went to bed, put myself on soup and crackers and it’s mainly gone today. I’m assuming it’s just a weird winter virus. Fortunately it doesn’t appear to have major lingering effects.
But enough about me and my various ailments which you really had no interest in. Weeks like this, however, have made me adopt the English translation of a Norwegian idiom when asked how I am – ‘Still upright and not crying too much’. But that idiom could apply to the entire sociopolitical moment in which we find ourselves. We’re at an inflection point. They happen with regular periodicity in Western culture, roughly eighty years apart. Why that timing? Likely because it takes that long for adult living memory of the last one to disappear and for the social structures carefully created by the survivors of the last to prevent a future one to weaken to the point where the next becomes inevitable. We’ll come out of this one, one way or another and there will be much pledging of never again and a reshaping of society to new forms to curb the worse excesses. But somewhere around 2100, when today’s children are in their 80s and 90s, the cycle will likely repeat.
80 years ago – the early 1940s. World War II which led to the construction of social structures to protect the children who became the Baby Boom from the horrors their parents had endured. This included a sanitized Norman Rockwell vision of US history and society, minimizes or eliminating those pieces involving out groups such as racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, which the current administration is trying to repurpose despite decades of cultural work to understand the complexities of our nation. (I read somewhere that the National Park Service has moved on from removing all mentions of slavery, Jim Crow and other mistreatment of African Americans at national historic sites to all mentions of Native Americans and how they were displaced, starved, and massacred). We have, just down the hill from me, the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument dedicated to the courage of sixty years ago which finally broke Jim Crow. I hate to think what has been removed there as DEI is kind of the point.
80 years before that – The Civil War. Telling that story without discussing the evils of slavery or the attempts of a wealthy elite to impose their economic and political world view on a population which was growing and changing in a very different way strikes me as counterproductive at best. 80 years before that The Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation and finally the Constitution which we have managed to live by for 225 years or so although the current administration appears to find it optional. 80 years before that the religious battles and schims which led to such things as the Glorious Revolution in England and the Salem Witch Trials in this country. 80 years before that, more religious strife which led to the Puritans fleeing England and ending up eventually in the Plymouth Colony. The rhyming if not necessarily the repetition of history.
The continued issues in Minneapolis seem to be causing rifts in both the administration and the Republican party. There’s been a lot of backpedaling in some quarters after it becomes more and more clear that the death of Alex Pretti was an extrajudicial execution and then there has been doubling down on obviously false narratives. Some of this has been awfully petty. Mr. Pretti’s coworkers tried to arrange a memorial gathering at the VA hospital where he worked as an ICU nurse. It was forbidden on administration orders. It doesn’t surprise me. After all, the VA police prevented even VA employees from parking in the Birmingham VA parking deck, just off the Pride Parade route, this past summer as that would be supporting ideologies with which the administration does not agree.
Some have said that perhaps the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are a Kent State moment. Maybe. After all, there have been a total of three murders so far in Minneapolis this month, two of them committed by ICE/Border Patrol. I don’t think this is over yet by a long shot. I think there will be shooting into an unarmed crowd with multiple casualties, the murder of a child, or other atrocity before there is enough of a rift for things to really change. What is happening, however, is a recognition by people who have always been in the in group in society that they are not part of the in group under this administration and they can therefore be targeted. Those finding themselves in this position need to befriend and, more importantly, listen to members of communities who have been out groups for decades or centuries and who have always lived life knowing they are a target. There is so much wisdom available if we will only reach out – and not be surprised at some early rebuffs. Where have we been before when they were crying for help? But persistence and person to person networking has always worked and what we need now.
No one would be fussing about detainment and deportations if they were handled, as under previous administrations, by the book with judicial oversight and obeyance of court orders and honoring of visas, asylum claims, marriages and the like. But we have an administration which is run in order to create content for a daily reality show where what’s needed is optics and domination of the news cycle and, most importantly ratings. Bureaucratic processes in offices and courtrooms don’t make good TV. Undertrained people cosplaying as Call of Duty characters against a background of snow and ice with various quasilegal crowd control techniques are many things but boring it not one of them. It’s not a mode of governance that’s been tried before in this country and I don’t think it’s terribly successful. Documentarians of the future are going to love it as they’re going to have a wealth of primary source material to choose from. Those of us living through the creation of all of that – maybe not so much.
I’m taking one more early night to try and get rid of the crud and then, in the morning, I’ll get up, get dressed (with fewer layers as we seem to be out of the deep freeze), go out and do what good I can.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 