What Is Wrong With Us?

What Is Wrong With Us?
Miami Beach, FL
January 10, 2019

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.  Counter to what Ariana Huffington suggests, which is to detach yourself from your media/phones/tablets/laptops at least one half hour before bedtime, I invite all of the media pundits into bed with me for a raucous night of horizontal partisan somnabulism.   Richard Painter, Jill Wein-Banks, David Jolly and their ilk all don their nighties and crawl under the covers to hell raise on the sad state of domestic affairs.  My hope is their clear-eyed view of what in hell's blazes is going on in our country will lull me into a sense of security about how everything that's happened since November 2016 will all turn out okay someday and I am not losing my mind.

Last night didn't do the trick.  It was a grim night of attacks on reality, the rule of law, the judiciary process, immigrants and more.  Usually I fall asleep in the "A" block of Rachel Maddow or Trevor Noah or Lawrence O'Donnell but last night some semi-conscious morose version of circumstances on the ground was injected into my blood stream.  Nothing specific about the content, just painfully negative.  When I woke up I just felt doom.

One of the things I keep coming back to is that if you can't agree on a set of facts with another person, you cannot have a reasonable debate about it.  If I say the sky is blue and you say the sky is Quasimodo or violin lessons or go-go boots, there is no starting point in which either one of us can make a reasonable argument to the other .  None.  One of the chief reasons behind the American Civil War was this much-more-than-existential crisis.  One group of people envisioned slavery as immoral and the other viewed it as rights of ownership of a commodity (i.e. African Americans).  With absolutely no middle ground and both sides dug in, it was just a matter of time before 620,000 people (or 206 9/11s) would give their lives to settle this fight.  And despite the passage of another 150 years, this is still being re-litigated on the streets of Ferguson and Charlottesville and elsewhere.

Everywhere you turn these days, this disagreement rears its ugly head.  Global warming is an imminent threat to civilization or a Chinese hoax?  Immigration is a boon to our all-inclusive ethos or a blood-and-soil struggle for white supremacy?  Taxes are a way to create a social safety net for our citizenry or a curse on can-do capitalism?  If we can't agree on the basic precept of issues in our world, we can never have a reasonable debate on compromise and coexistance until such time as it all boils to a head.

I drove to Miami Beach to have lunch with my friend Jeff, who I met in early recovery.  He has come a very long way since we first met and is better proof than most about the benefits of sobriety and recovery.  I am both oddly envious (and sad) that he has climbed aboard the corporate hamster wheel of success, envious because money means security in our society but sad, because in our youth we co-conspired about the enjoyments of travel and pleasure.  I can't say that he doesn't still have those enjoyments, but today, he had meetings, meetings, meetings.

And perhaps, after a $14 avocado toast at Icebox Cafe my aggravation was exacerbated by a man splayed prone and unconscious across a bus stop and street on the corner of Acton and 16th Street in South Beach.   It seems like after 2008, our economy has roared all the way back but seems to have left an inordinate number of people behind.  Why can't we as a society take care of the growing number of people piled up on the streets of our cities, stacked like drunken firewood, literally everywhere you turn?

While I can't blame Donald Trump for everything, the coarsening of attitudes toward everyone not white and gainfully employed saddens me.  As a society do we not have the political will to help each other or is it just plainly not the job of government or social services or common decency?  How can I eat a piece of toast for $14 and then maneuver through a mass of homeless people every direction you turn as though they were invisible?  Is that just liberal guilt or willful delusion?

I think the news that people on food stamps and many other people will be thrown into upheaval this week by the continued government shutdown makes me keenly aware of how much we have lost empathy for one another and wondering if we are simmering to another boil, or will our better angels turn the heat down before blood is spilled.

 I never feel like I have to defend my desire to find consensus with everyone around me, but it becomes maddening when everything you think is right has been questioned as the opposite.