Wish We Weren’t Here (Postcard from the Edge)

Up here in the country I thought I could escape news of our Country but the truth is I haven’t earned that right. None of us have, not this year. There are children in concentration camps. There is a militia rapidly forming on our fourth-reich ruler’s behest. There are shootings every day–shootings, I’m sorry, that you can’t pray away. And thanks to corporate colonization of this land we are rapidly cycling into an environment uninhabitable for humans and many other species of life. The earth will survive but not humans and certainly not America. So these first three days I’ve been upstate have been tumultuous—the animals are subject to unusual unrest, the woods seem wicked, even my car seems…possessed.

Because we all are. The land we perch on has been possessed since European settlers first manipulated the native tribes and then made a holiday out of it. Trump didn’t just happen to us, neither did the GOP. We participated in their inception every day we didn’t stop meadows from being paved over, sat still when we should have rose up, took what flat-out wasn’t ours. So, ya, this is my “vacation face.” It’s not so relaxed. “Radical self-care” be damned, I haven’t earned the right to relax. None of us have in this burning building called America.

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