Never An Ordinary Life

They say the mad king is dying.

I don’t know exactly when the president’s frail health stopped being an observation that a small group of people were pointing out, and became a mainstream joke. I feel as if it happened within the last fifteen days or so. But now the pictures of his badly bruised hand have become a meme. His increasingly unhinged rants at press conferences have become a punchline. The vice president mentioned, in an interview, that he feels quite ready to take over. Just now as I’m writing there’s a rumor, probably not true, that he’s already gone. People are posting “Weekend at Bernie’s” memes online and having a good time. I assume things will go on just as they are for awhile yet.

Meanwhile, the world is still coming apart like a pasteboard box dropped into water. The Center for Disease Control is collapsing, and they tell me that the next pandemic will be far worse than the one five years ago as a result. The prices for food are already shooting up, and they tell me that next month will be so horrible it’ll make me forget the financial pinch of August.  Steubenville’s summer has been abruptly curtailed by a polar blast, so chilly we’ve had to have the heat on at night, and they tell me that the climate will only get more and more erratic. Countries are stopping mail to the United States. The states are gerrymandering their districts so that fewer and fewer people’s votes will matter when we hold another election.

The military are loafing around the nation’s capitol, with guns. They say they’re going to be sent to Chicago next. I have a friend in Chicago, with five Mexican-American children, and I’m afraid for her safety. Masked Immigration officers keep swooping in to tear apart families and place sobbing people under arrest as it is. Now, there could be soldiers as well. They say the president, or what’s left of him, is sending the military to all the big cities in blue states before long, and I don’t know what will happen after that. Surely nothing good, not for awhile yet.

I don’t think that we will ever get the old United States back.

There’s no going back to about 2014 or so, because the events of 2015 and after are the fruition of a movement that’s been eating away at America since before I was born. I don’t think a culture where this many human beings were willing to vote for a mad king three times, is a culture that’s suddenly going to become sane. I don’t think a society that hates poor people, immigrants and non-whites this deeply is going to put the genie back in the bottle. I don’t think a nation this gullible will suddenly grow wise. We’re going to have to move on through this– not from this, but through this, and it will be a painful fight, and someday, America might become something good. I don’t know how long that will take.

I’ve lived in Interesting Times my whole life. All Millennials have. We watched terrorists kill thousands of our fellow citizens on television when we were teenagers, and it hasn’t gotten better from there. Just five years ago, I watched the police beat protesters to a pulp in my hometown of Columbus, during a pandemic, and then they brought in the National Guard, and we thought the November election might bring about a permanent change, but it didn’t. I have always wondered what it would be like to have an ordinary life, but I will never know.

Again and again I wonder how historians will write about this time.

Again and again, I feel like a character in a story, and I hope it’s a good one. I hope I am a hero, and not the tragic kind.  I hope I someday reach a happy ending. But most of all, I’d like an ordinary life.

When I was a little girl I dreamed about being heroic and brave. I wanted to be a pluckier version of Jill from The Silver Chair or a character from The Lord of the Rings, or a member of the Johansen family from Number the Stars. But now that I’m forty I want an ordinary life. I want to grow my garden, and take care of the neighborhood children at the church outreach, and bake and cook and tend to the cat. I want to send Adrienne to college and visit on Parent Weekend, and grow a beautiful garden. I never want to have to be heroic as long as I live. But I think I’ll have to be.

The other day I walked home through Union Cemetery.

The car was still in the shop, so I took the bus to the grocery store. I didn’t want to ride on the noisy vehicle twice, so I ducked into the graveyard to get back to LaBelle. I took the hiking trail, past those Union soldier headstones. The name of that hiking trail is McCook Walk: named for the Fighting McCooks, Civil War heroes from Carrolton an hour away. There are three McCooks buried in Union Cemetery. There is also a Revolutionary War hero, Johann Fischer, who was born in Germany but helped fight to free America from her first mad king, King George the Third. There are veterans of most of the wars America’s fought, scattered throughout the cemetery.

In the middle of the cemetery is a wooded trail by a stream. The stream was so low from the droughty July in August that I couldn’t hear it babble. It didn’t seem to flow at all. It just appeared and disappeared in places, a clear pool here, a stagnant pool there. To the other side of me was a tangle of stinging nettle, and a forest of deciduous trees, and a shale cliff that shot straight up. There was Appalachia, the place that’s become home. There was the final resting place of so many human beings who have fought for America.

What is America?

America is a plot of ground with cities and cemeteries and people on top. Sometimes it’s flat, and sometimes it’s mountainous, and sometimes it’s shale cliffs with nettles at the bottom.

America is a cruel illusion, a fiction, a sleight of hand. America is a big game that we talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while building our wealth on the blood of the Indigenous and the backs of enslaved people. America is a mother who murders her own children. America is a fantasy so delicate that one narcissistic mad king broke it to bits.

America is a beautiful ideal. America is a noble and admirable hypothesis. America is an experiment that has been amazing whenever it’s been tried. Whenever somebody hears “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and says “that means me too,” and fights like mad to make it true, even though they know full well the Founding Fathers didn’t mean them, they are the very best Americans. Every time they succeed even a little bit, then America is the most wonderful thing in the world.

America is a noble prize, worth fighting for. We have been fighting for nearly two hundred fifty years. Someday, we might win.

Someday, we might make America great.

It isn’t great right now.

It started to rain as I walked, and the rain felt so good that I forgot to worry for awhile.

I came out of the cemetery and crossed the street to LaBelle, a neighborhood that used to be middle-class and is mostly poor now. I cut through the alleys where the bindweed and wild peas were climbing up to bury the world.

I am an American, in the darkest of times.

I will never have an ordinary life.

But I might have a good one.