I know I didn’t just wake up on Mars. Like that night –in my early 40’s–when I looked out the window of our carriage barn in lower Michigan and saw Venus like some alien UFO, when shortly thereafter my son woke me to an entire sky of glimmering green northern lights. I didn’t have to be in Alaska or even at our camp in the UP to see them shimmer. I didn’t just wake up in a different world with a different life. No, I didn’t. Different air, the ground shifting beneath my feet like that Newport Beach earthquake I lived through once? As if the ground floor apartment was a boat, rocking gently in a rolling sea. All natural shocks to the system.
It doesn’t happen like that– as surreal, abrupt, and heartbrakingly breathtaking (my favorite word presently) as they seem.
No, it happens in tiny increments: one overlooked harmless idealistic idiotic gesture after another. Who would take them seriously? Highschool, college, grad school, adjunct professor, pen poised — the naive belief our constitution could withstand their ludicrous assault. When of course nothing could withstand it if since we were always willing to do nothing.
And they know it.
They were willing to do what they needed to by any means necessary.
One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see it, either. (Prefereable by far to being unquestioning and willing sheep to the slaughter.)
We took her for granted, resisting the fanatic behavior they resorted to and that we abhored.
I’ve always disliked hyperbole. But this literal virus, a harbinger of the fascist one threatening to change it all, a political party willing to exploit it.
Might as well be on the moon.
Or Venus.
What next? What will we do next? We may have one final stand to make here. Will we make it? Or will we err once again?
L.E.K. 