Grief Is The Word
BY ED SIKOV
Michelle Goldberg is
one of the best opinion
writers — maybe
the best — working
at The Times today. I fi nd myself
agreeing with almost everything
she writes. I wish I didn’t agree
with her this time .
“Lately, I think I’m experiencing
democracy grief. For anyone who
was, like me, born after the civil
rights movement fi nally made democracy
in America real, liberal
democracy has always been part
of the climate, as easy to take for
granted as clean air or the changing
of the seasons. When I contemplate
the sort of illiberal oligarchy
that would await my children
should Donald Trump win another
term, the scale of the loss feels so
vast that I can barely process it.”
This is Michelle Goldberg writing
in the New York Times last week.
I know exactly what she means.
Lately I’ve been fi lled with deep despair
over the sorry, sorry state of
our country, a growing sense of impending
doom. Here’s an example
of the kind of news that keeps me
up at night (and bear in mind that
the one, the only, good thing about
having Parkinson’s disease is that
I am never at a loss for sedatives):
We have the Senate Majoritty Leader
Mitch McConnell, openly stating
that he and the entire Republican
Senate caucus — more than half
the jury in the trial phase of the impeachment
— will be taking their
marching orders directly from the
White House, and it gives me none
of the I told you so compensatory
pleasure that in my younger days
would have come naturally, like a
lovely, smug rainbow during a vicious
thunderstorm.
I have tried to understand the
other side. I really have. I’ve got
friends who are Trumpies — not
close friends, but rather Facebook
friends, and I try to take their
posts seriously. I like them as individuals;
I’ve known them since
we were kids. But I can’t help it: I
devalue them with every horrible
thing they post. I see them as less
and less than fully human. And I
am deeply ashamed of that.
Moreover, despite the self-assurance
Time Magazine names 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg the Person of the Year.
The president of the United States of America responds to Time’s choice of Person of the Year.
of the “M*A*S*H” theme, suicide
may or may not be painless,
but if Rump wins again, we ‘ll all
have one more reason to fi nd out.
Goldberg: “The Trump presidency
has been marked, for many
of us who are part of the plurality
that despises it, by anxiety and
anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and
not just in myself, a demoralizing
degree of fear, even depression. You
can see it online, in the self-protective
TIME.COM
TWITTER/ REALDONALDTRUMP
cynicism of liberals announcing
on Twitter that Trump is going
to win re-election. In The Washington
Post, Michael Gerson , a former
speechwriter for George W. Bush
and a Never Trump conservative,
described his spiritual struggle
against feelings of political desperation:
‘Sustaining this type of
distressed uncertainty for long periods,
I can attest, is like putting
arsenic in your saltshaker.’”
P E R S P E C T I V E : M e d i a C i r c u s
Please pass the salt.
Goldberg also writes about a
woman from Georgia who she met
while covering the special election
that ended up fl ipping a House seat
from red to blue.
“‘It’s like watching someone you
love die of a wasting disease,’ she
said, speaking of our country.
‘Each day, you still have that little
hope no matter what happens,
you’re always going to have that
little hope that everything’s going
to turn out O.K., but every day it
seems like we get hit by something
else.’ Some mornings, she said, it’s
hard to get out of bed. ‘It doesn’t
feel like depression,’” she said. ‘It
really does feel more like grief.’”
Goldberg is not merely onto
something. She’s hit the nail right
on the head. The depression, the
fear to the point of terror, and the
deep nausea of which she speaks
are the defi ning emotions of our
time, at least for Goldberg’s and my
“plurality.”
Back at the small Conservative
synagogue at which I attended
Sunday School, we were bombarded
with Holocaust facts and stories.
At the time I thought it was
overkill (so to speak). Meanwhile,
in the public school I attended,
we learned nothing about it at all.
The ninth grade me concluded
from this wide gap in experiences
that Jews were overly paranoid.
Now, with the president calling
neo-Nazis “very fi ne people,” and
seemingly the only thing standing
between me and an even more effi
cient Auschwitz is the Christian
right’s belief that the presence of
Jews in Israel is somehow crucial
to the Second Coming, I am, as my
coreligionist Fagin sings in “Oliver!,”
reviewing the situation.
According to Goldberg, I’m not
being totally paranoid, or, at least
my paranoia is shared.
“Three years ago, said Karen
Starr, a psychologist who practices
in Manhattan and on Long Island,
some of her patients were ‘in a
state of alarm,’ but that’s changed
into ‘more of a chronic feeling that’s
bordering on despair.’ Among
those most affected, she said, are
the Holocaust survivors she sees.
‘It’s about this general feeling that
the institutions that we rely on to
protect us from a dangerous individual
might fail,’ she said.”
The only word I dispute is
“might.”
GayCityNews.com | December 19, 2019 - January 1, 2020 21
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