After an amazingly pleasant day yesterday, I sat on my balcony and began writing my observations for the day. What made it pleasant was a combination of the weather and the simplicity of the day. I had a nice walk in the morning, exercised, sat outside a coffee shop and read, went to a bookstore and picked up a new (to me) volume of poetry, went to a deli where I sat outside and had a beer. My big observations were mostly about the cranes dumping rocks in the river as an effort to change our surroundings and how it’s not dissimilar from a new small business opening up in town; how central Pennsylvania in some respects could be like Asheville, NC; and how these two little children at the Deli met and the one tried to share her pizza with the other.
I didn’t get very far in my recollections. I had barely finished writing about my walk and how I stopped to watch the cranes attempt to change the banks of the Mississippi when the news broke about Justice Ginsburg. My heart sank and suddenly none of what I had to say seemed to matter very much. That seems to be a recurring theme this year. All of the small internal struggles, triumphs, observations fall quickly into irrelevance given the scale of a pandemic, wildfires, civil unrest, and what feels like a very chaotic world. It seems that the more I try to push myself to accept the world as it is with all of its wonderful flaws, a new injustice is revealed by quickly changing global conditions.
Last night after hearing about Ginsburg’s passing, I knew that those very politicians who argued for not appointing a justice in an election year (Scalia passed in February of 2016 and hearings on the Garland appointment were stalled for almost 300 days) would announce that it is necessary to appoint a justice in an election year (a mere 45 days before an election). This is why I hate politics – the blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty. Sure enough, within the hour, it was announced that there would be hearings on appointing a new justice. I welcome a healthy political debate. I welcome discussing differences in ideology. Politics in America seem to have moved beyond the point of discussion and debate and into an all out win-at-all costs war. It seems that so few politicians are held accountable for what they say and do. It seems like we’ve lost the middle ground and the ability for reasonable compromise. It seems like our politicians have pitted us against each other instead of bringing us together. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to this because some of my recent life experiences have involved people whose words and actions were not only at odds with each other, but bordered on that now over-used term “gaslighting.”
The more I work to be self-aware and less hypocritical, the less tolerant I feel towards people who use power and manipulation for their own self-interest. And don’t get me wrong – I expect people to act in their own self-interest. It’s human nature. But I am more interested in those that can set their self-interests to the side, or at least try to minimize them. I’m more interested in building up than I am in tearing down. Yet, the state of affairs makes me feel like an outsider… makes me feel like I don’t know the rules of the game. Sometimes, it seems like the only option is to walk away, to disengage, to check out. There is no debate, no compromise, no consensus (in relationships, politics, or anything involving other humans) if there is no honesty.
I’ve been re-reading a number of my blog posts. I’ve shared a lot about love and relationships and the struggles I’ve had in trying to make sense of how it all works. Some days, I think I’m trying to figure out how to live a good and meaningful life. Other days, I’m just bitching about minor and major, personal and global injustices. I use words like love and home and then sometimes think that I’ve become this complete flake with a whiny, stereotypical, peacenik hippy voice… “can’t we all just get along, man.” That’s the cynic in me being self-critical. Some days it’s not about bitching or about figuring out how to live – some days, I’m just trying to avoid the slide into cynicism that so easily creeps in. I’m often disheartened… I sit at cafes precisely for moments like yesterday when two children (one who was still learning how to walk) greeted each other with joy and curiosity, and then one, unprompted, chose to share what she had (a little bit of gnawed on pizza) with the other. A girl and a boy. One black, the other white. One the child of a heterosexual couple, the other the child of a lesbian couple. The kids didn’t see or know or care about any of those differences. There was no cynicism in that moment, no ideology, no politics. And I don’t blame you – whoever reads this – for the slight eyeroll or for thinking it feels a little too much like a hallmark moment, a little too contrived. Those thoughts crept in for me too. Those are the thoughts I try to beat back so that I might see the world in a better light.