Like most everyone else this muddy-headed morning, I find myself pondering the implications of what happened last night. The presidency "hangs in the balance" says the punditsphere, while the Senate will likely stay Republican and guarantee complete governmental gridlock even if Biden pulls it out. We may lose the circus at the top, but our national mess will remain the same.
I almost chose to write nothing today, figuring I would raise the ire of one or two of the dozen folks who read this most mornings. Maybe that is part of the problem; we have normalized a national political dialogue this vulgar, this misogynistic, this vilely racist, by smiling and holding our tongues when some authoritarian in a MAGA hat invades our space with that red-brimmed symbol of hatred. We have spent at least 25 years letting this happen, since the Contract with America, and arguably much longer. Maybe for our entire national history, although I do not recall a dialogue this shocking and coarse in any of the public spaces of my childhood.
The sad fact of the election is not that the wrong person might find his way into the Oval Office--it's what this moment says about us as a society. We are angry, ignorant tribalists who've wrapped ourselves in American exceptionalism as we have, in four years' time, become to the world the equivalent of the mentally handicapped kid roaming the playground with an assault rifle and a spittle-spraying harangue of grievances. We're exceptional all right.
Being from nowhere in particular, I have too quickly in my life availed myself of a geographic solution to life's problems. When I was an unruly teen, I was sent away to live with my grandparents in California. When I finished college, I left the Golden State and its extreme form of leftist libertarianism for a South I saw as part Camelot, part Nirvana, an ideal place of my childhood that never existed. Then for three decades I built a life there, went to one of its finest law schools, raised kids, spent too much time in church. All the while, the tide of ugliness was rising around me, manifested first through eyebrow-raising racist comments in polite company, then by neighbors mouthing toxic ideas heard on talk radio, and then finally via that meth lab of hatred, social media.
P's always been a wanderer, too (hence, "Sojourners" and not "Sojourner"), but her story is hers to tell, not mine. I just observe that we bear similar wiring.
With this election approaching, Peg and I decided to leave the place we'd grown to love more than any other, Wyldswood, to abide here in this island of sanity nestled below the Finger Lakes. I remember the day we drove off---we had not packed, had not planned; I'm guessing it was as chaotic and disorganized as anything Peggy Wylds has participated in during her adult life. That chaos was a form of denial, looking back at it. Deep down we knew we may never come back. After yesterday, the world came one step closer to forcing a new beginning by burning our old lives to the ground.
How does one go back, knowing what we know now about our neighbors? It's not that we disagree with their vote. It's that what just happened is a visible manifestation of a moral, intellectual, and spiritual malignancy that is toxic to our own souls. And living next to someone who is okay with displaying a flag or wearing a hat that proclaims "No More Bullshit" is bound to become dangerous at some point. My people have a history of burning out and driving off folks who think differently.
Maybe that wouldn't happen. I really don't know, and am this morning in the throes of my own emotional response to the moment. Still, I find myself returning to a pattern of old and wondering, is it possible to build a life somewhere else at my age?
That raises the question of where is far enough. Leaving the country is a hell of a lot harder that you might think---remember my comment about the big, dangerous kid roaming the schoolyard? No one wants us, and I can't say I blame them. There is no airport screener for MAGA paraphernalia, and a lot of these countries are dealing with their own authoritarian and pandemic issues.
Then there is the matter of making a living. P and I both have professional licenses that don't travel well, if at all. The Irish bar makes you take their exam in Irish, not English. Have you ever tried to read or say anything in Irish? It is purposefully unintelligible. Imagine trying to write an essay on the rule against perpetuities in Klingon.
Maybe Canada, so P and I could drive across the border and work? The issue is that the Canucks impose their own hurdles, so it's not a gimme that we'd be welcome there, either.
Then there is lovely, idyllic Corning, a town that could have been pulled out of a coffee table book of Norman Rockwell paintings, with an educated, apparently sane population who are as genuinely nice as any I've encountered. What's the issue here? Well, I'd still have to start over, although the New York bar exam is blessedly in English. It would also likely entail several years, maybe the rest of my career, making not a whole hell of a lot of money, with an ex-wife snipping at my heels all the while.
Those are problems P and I can tackle. The real consideration is that we'd still be in the U.S., and perched on an island surrounded by country people outside of town who, to a person, have Trump flags fluttering in their yards and, therefore, hatred for pointy-headed city folk in their hearts. Res ipsa loquitur. Not to mention that Trump himself has shown an authoritarian impulse to use the military I help finance (more than he does, in fact, based on his tax returns) against parts of the country where his party is in the minority. Like New York, for example.
But maybe he'll lose when all of this plays out. That's not the point, however. The horrible realization on this rarest of clear, sunny Southern Tier fall mornings, is that most of the neighbors with whom I've shared my adult life in north Florida are comfortable with what DJT stands for, as a politician and a human being. They are actually really nice people, mostly anyway, but authoritarian societies are full of solid, kind folks whose moms were probably baking cookies for the political hit squads that roamed their neighborhoods in Minsk and Munich and Phnom Penh. Nice doesn't cut it. But is it just as bad to shake the dust off our soles and walk away?
I'm too old for this, but so were generations of sojourners who found themselves, to their surprise, fleeing a collapsing society for a new life somewhere else. It's been done before. It just hurts.
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