Love Among the Ruins

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

― Abraham Lincoln

These should be the very best of times. Last night we cooked wings in the air fryer, feasted in our Bills livery, and then hopped into the jacuzzi tub for a bubble bath with Josh Allen and the guys and a glass of cabernet.

But there's this pall, a zeitgeist in which we all swim that affects everything, ruins so much of life right now. The Bills play in one of the most progressive cities in a progressive corner of the country. That means no ridiculous Charlie Kirk moment of silence. Down in the Bronx, the Yankees subjected their fans to just that last week. And if you suggest online that he was an internet troll who shouldn't be mourned even if his murder, as with any murder, is a tragedy, Big Brother is reading your posts and if you have any ties to the south your job and even your driver's license may be at risk.

So instead of enjoying a nice soak before bed and basking in the presence of the beloved other (that would be Peg, not Josh Allen, although we really like him too), we found Kirk's bloody corpse floating there with us. What to do as a civil war begins? Nothing in our upbringing prepared us for this. And although there's a geographic component to this, one can't do as Sherman did in 1861 and load your family onto a wagon and move to a free state. The descendants of the Copperheads and Doughfaces fill the hills around us in western New York.

And there won't be a free state military organizing to hold off the dark forces at DJT's disposal--we made a rather fateful decision after the Second World War to maintain a large, standing military in peacetime for the first time ever in U.S. history, with the promise that this apparatus of violence would never turn on its keepers, sort of like AI I guess. They underscored that principle by at the same time changing its name to the Department of Defense. Now it's back to being the Department of War. See the signs and know their meaning. Words matter.

So it's impossible to imagine a military opposition to MAGA, unless our own military takes their oath seriously. Early signs aren't promising.

But I didn't want to prattle on about all that this morning. Instead, I find myself thinking of the topic of my talk with P amidst the bubbles and Bills last night. How does one find joy and love in the midst of all this? An all-encompassing anhedonia has crept into our lives, washing color and light out of everything from food to enjoying a perfect fall day. Of course, sitting in a jacuzzi tub with P should speak for itself, and yet we find ourselves in that moment trying to address this crisis we sense all around us. And it arrives in what should have been the last truly healthy and happy chapter of our lives, before decline and doctor visits replace work and travel.

Maybe the answer is to build a stockade around this thing P and I have together, to pull down the blinds on the internet and turn our back on what's happening. There seems to be nothing we can do about it, after all. We have family and grocery money and homes nestled in beautiful places. It's not a matter of creating an alternative reality by filling the space with lies, which would make us Republicans. Instead, it's just acknowledging that there are images and words out there that we have the discretion to ignore, and probably should.

Time to finish this week's tax lesson. This stuff is incredibly difficult compared with the coursework during the first half of the program. Or at least it seems that way to me right now.