Maybe It's Time

When they kick at your front door

How you gonna come?

With your hands on your head

Or on the trigger of your gun

When the law break in

How you gonna go?

Shot down on the pavement

Or waiting in death row

You can crush us, you can bruise us

But you'll have to answer to

Oh-oh, the guns of Brixton

The money feels good

And your life you like it well

But surely your time will come

As in Heaven as in Hell

-The Clash, The Guns of Brixton

The pillow talk this morning around five, with Slane yowling at our bedside, centered on the consequences of living among folks who voted overwhelmingly for what's happening now in America.

We have, or had, friends here we've known for decades. Or thought we knew, as one-by-one they came out as full fash on the eve of the last election. Our social circle has dwindled as we've come to feel we can't be in the same room with them, can't break bread with treason.

But what is treason here, really? I argue it's defying the authority of the Constitution many of us took an oath to protect and defend, but let's face it: that sacred text had slavery expressly baked into it, and was only ratified after it was tweaked in multiple ways to give the slaveholders an outsized vote in the new republic. This crazy, Christian white supremacist autocracy, or kakistocracy, isn't really all that far outside the four corners of the document.

The courts having the final say on "what the law is"? Not in the Constitution. Exactly what we mean by "due process"? They left that open to interpretation, leaving our originalist legal scholars to white out several decades of jurisprudence on that point.

A few folks smarter than me have pointed to the Declaration of Independence as the writing that actually embodies our founding principles. Standing up to unchecked and unaccountable authority. Thriving as an individual in the liberty space created by our government. That's what I always thought we were all about. And it still is--as long as you're a white man.

Which, let's face it, is just what the Founders envisioned.

So I guess I can't call my neighbors traitors. As Dave Mason laconically put it, "We just disagree".

But in the predawn whispers between P and me, the question was how our otherwise sane friends and colleagues bought into all this? Always the master of the lousy metaphor, I commented, "If you swim around in a tank of shit, eventually you're going to swallow the occasional mouthful. And eventually it's going to change you."

No wonder The Last of Us is so popular, a TV series following a pair trying to make their way through a post-apocalyptic United States whose population has become infected with a fungus that turns them all, us all, into zombies. Sometimes fiction tells the real truths.

That observation, that we risk turning into MAGA zombies, risk our very souls swimming in this mire, coupled with another observation this weekend that's been hanging around in my head. This past Saturday was our first wedding at Wyldswood, and the place was filled with family there to celebrate the day and wish the best for this very young couple. Our event manager introduced us to children and grandchildren that all live within a few blocks, and they see each other most every day.

This is something P and I haven't really had, family nearby. I hadn't missed it before, but this weekend I found myself thinking that maybe we ought to get serious about moving closer to the only kids who ever check in on us, and make an effort to find times to get together (well, PT does that as well, always making sure we know when he's in town and keeping us abreast of what he's doing. He's a fine young man, that one). Maybe if we sold off this real estate empire we've amassed, once the economic apocalypse cools a little, we could buy someplace close-but-not-too-close, perhaps in the hills of southeast New Hampshire, and have the occasional Sunday dinner with family, or trip together at least for a couple days before we all get sick of each other, which happens even in the closest of families.

Maybe it's time to move closer to family. Neither of us is getting any younger, and it'd be nice to spend time together before we're in a diaper.

Plus the politics. Congress bears most of the blame for not checking the authority of our new king, but both of our representatives in Florida actively condone what's happening, cleave to it politically. Disgusting.

Our congressman in New York is only marginally better, blaming George Soros for a little protest in front of his storefront on Market Street in Corning a couple weeks ago.

At least New Hampshire is solidly purple, and Mass is the center of the opposition, just as they were the last time a group of Confederates sought to fracture the country for their personal benefit.

I just looked up the congresspersons we'd inherit if we moved to the Granite State. Both Dems, and the one representing Nashua clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer and served as counsel in Trump's impeachment trial. Well, one of them. Who gets impeached twice?

So, back to being among smart, nice people. Perhaps after a time you won't smell the shit wafting off of us from our time swimming in the pit. Healing waters.