Winter in America

And now it's winter, winter in America

And all of the healers have been killed, or sent away.

And the people know, people know it's winter

Winter in America

And ain't nobody fighting, cause nobody knows what to save.

-Gil Scott Heron

I lived for nearly ten years not far from the world capital of marmot based meteorology, Punxsutawney Pennsylvania. Early this morning, tens of thousands of revelers descended on that sleepy little hill outside town called Gobbler's Knob and watched as a man in a top had pulled a fat groundhog out of his "burrow," and waited for the creature to either come out and go about his woodchuck business (not chucking wood), or "see his shadow" and go back in the burrow.  This year he saw his shadow and went back in, so we get six more weeks of winter, rather than spring being just around the corner.  It's all highly scientific.

Groundhog Day is all good fun, nobody really cares that much about what the rodent actually does, it's all an excuse to get drunk and have a party.  The groundhog doesn't actually live in the burrow on the hill anyway, he lives in a rather posh habitat down in town, where generations of Punxsy Phils have lived and been fed and cared. By contrast most of Phil's numerous relatives in Indiana County are often exterminated with extreme prejudice by farmers because they are destructive nuisance.

For a very long time, the United States has been that protective shelter for its citizens.  We have safety, security and prosperity on a scale that makes us the envy of the world.  Add to that a remarkably stable and balanced form of government, and it would be easy to believe that we are living in a divinely sanctioned holy empire.  But we are Punxsutawney Phil. We are the one actual rodent in all of creation that people want to care about and lift up and look at and ooh and aah about. And we have the luxury of remaining blissfully ignorant of how our fellow marmots are regularly shot from afar with high powered rifles and left to rot in the ditch.

Recent events have shaken our confidence in our own blessedness, at least they have shaken my complacency.  If I'm being honest, I am more frightened for the future of our republic right now than I was after 9-11, because this time:

Here's the thing, it's not just the tangerine in chief that worries me. To me Trump is and always has been a petulant egomaniac. He would not be dangerous by himself, but he has seized on the fear of our nation, the worst angels of our nature rather than the better ones that Lincoln called forth. And he has risen at the precise moment when our political life has been degraded by years of ineffective infighting and our public discourse has been polluted by a "post-truth" mentality. In less than two weeks the spirit of the age has summoned the worst of us on both sides of the aisle; the left is angry and there have been eruptions of violence, the right is demonstrating how to be about as ungracious in victory as you can possibly be short of actually following through on the campaign threat to lock up their opposition.

I don't care what your political inclinations are, if you're pleased with the direction our country is moving right now, you might want to see a mental health professional ASAP. This is not making a mountain out of a molehill, the kind of toxicity that is out there right now is the stuff that leads to utter meltdowns and conflagrations.

I was born around the time that Gil Scot Heron wrote Winter in America, in the wake of Nixon and Watergate and the 1970's hangover.  I grew up in Reagan's America and I when I heard that song for the first time when I was probably twelve or so, I liked it, but I don't think I really felt it until now.  I'm looking for healers, and even the people who normally fill those shoes are girding for battle.  I don't really know what to fight or how to fight because I really don't know what to save.  Case in point: Gorsuch, should the Democrats filibuster and try to block him because the GOP wouldn't even give Garland a chance? Tit for tat, eye for an eye? What would his confirmation mean if it does go through, how much damage is he going to do? After all he is replacing the most "conservative" justice on SCOTUS, would he really shift things all that much? By most accounts he is qualified and capable, even if I don't like his location on the political spectrum, is that the hill we want to die on? I don't have answers to these questions, only anxiety about what is going to happen.

For most of my life our government has seemed so utterly predictable and plodding even.  It could be frustrating, but I was taught that it was that way for a good reason, as a bulwark against tyranny. My hope was that even if someone like Trump conned the American voters into electing him that the system would prove stronger than the individual, that's how it's supposed to work. Unfortunately, I may have underestimated the level of dysfunction in the system (but frankly it's still too early to tell). The reality is that Trump has managed to utterly scuttle diplomatic decorum and punch holes in what little was left of a bipartisan or even non-partisan cooperation.  He is deliberately antagonistic to other world leaders, he is dismissive of people who disagree with him, and he persists with demonstrably false statements about things both relevant and pointless. It would seem like no accident that his preferred method of dialogue is Twitter.  His is a social media approach to politics, big splashy, clickbait headlines, no publicity is bad publicity as long as that hit count rises, bring on the trolls and the fake news, kick out the actual journalists, go for the knee jerk reaction, don't ever slow down long enough to think or even go check Snopes (they're just another liberal media mouthpiece anyway). 

After the intellectual, almost laconic style of the Obama administration this is more of a shock than I was prepared to handle.  It's like thinking that you switched the channel from C-SPAN to the Cartoon Network, except that you realize you're still watching C-SPAN. It's been jarring to say the least.

I think we might be in for more than six weeks of winter in America.