America Possessed

I go for whole weeks totally numb to the abject horror of our current administration. It’s not that my numbness is excusable. Nor is it that I don’t care. It’s that I reach a point of saturation in which the immense and odious destruction is more than I can bear if I’m to stay afloat in the ocean of my precarious life. Then out of nowhere it arrives again on my chest, as unavoidable as an anvil: this total absence of humanity and compassion–this sociopathology, this evil–reigning over one of the most powerful nations on Planet Earth.

When this happens, I feel such sorrow and fear and rage that I sob great wracking sobs where ever I am, subway, business meeting, bedroom, laundromat, coffee shop, sitting with you, sitting with me.

These are such dark times. Perhaps it’s the bottom we’ve been needing to wake us up but progress is no more set in stone than the revelations of Trump’s malfeasance will automatically get him impeached. None of us can afford our numbness, no matter how despondent and desperate we become. The numbness is how it all started. The numbness will leave us no place to go.

For evil, I have come to believe, is what fills every space we do not tenderly tend. “Nature abhors a vaccuum” is one of the most dangerous realities of our time, because possession is what occurs when we abandon each other and ourselves. Right now, we are possessed by a man so removed from his soul that it’s as if he does not have one. Certainly, none of us have met the God in Trump–not even Trump. (That he thinks he is God is a sure sign he’s never been introduced.) America is possessed by a man possessed.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy