One down, three to go.

    

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

     “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
                                                                  ― Haruki Murakami

    The optimist in me wants to point to one year, done and gone, as of today. The first year of Trump 2.0 in the bag! Yippee! We made it through. We're still here, sorta.

     Are we? Not everybody, of course. Renee Good is no longer with us. Plus hundreds of thousands of people who were living among us, neighbors and colleagues and employees, bosses and friends and relatives, working, raising families, snatched off the street by masked men, dispatched to unknown fates outside the purview of law. No celebration for them. Or their loved ones. Or anybody who cares about things such as the Constitution. And the dignity of human beings. And decency.

     Besides, even if we came off the first year, unscarred, or not all that scarred anyway, there are three more to go. Based on the damage being done, the standards eroded, the precedents set, the reputation soiled, even then, even if there is an election, and someone not committed to imposing a cult of personality fascist state wins, the foundation is cracked, the rot exposed. We will never be free of this. I am certain of that. We are changed or — to be negative — our true national self is revealed, undeniable. The Vietnam War. Jim Crow. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry. The war against labor. Racism and sexism, bigotry and cruelty, greed and indifference. Once you start looking for bad stuff in our past, there's a lot of it.

     That isn't defeatism. The starry eyed look toward some transformative miracle, that will make everything right, justice and decency showing up at the last moment, like the officer in white at the end of "Lord of the Flies." I don't think that. No bucket of water is going to melt the Wicked Witch and inspire the castle guard to take a knee and all hail Dorothy. Only in the movies. 

     But if there is one — and I hate to use the word — lesson in all this, it is that there is a darkness and a hardness and a meanness in all people, just waiting for the right pied piper to play the right tune and draw it out. That was true before the arrival of the current administration. And it will be true long after it is gone, replaced by ... God knows what. How can good hope to prevail if it doesn't even recognize the game being played?

     That is not a recipe for surrender. There is also goodness and fairness and decency. We see that too. Americans did not look away when their neighbors were being hauled off. They did not cringe. They stood up, and fought the fight that has always be fought. The centuries-old struggle to get to the state that our current leader has ripped apart so easily. It is a struggle that never ends, that never can end. Not a truth that makes anybody feel good but, another lesson many American can't seem to stomach: the truth doesn't exist to make you feel good.