HOLIDAY SALE!
Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off! Do you see a pattern in the way events act on you, changing your outlook or behavior? At the end of a very trying year, as I reflect on my life, I do, I definitely do.I’ve tended to think of my life in conventional cycles grounded in age or relationship or location. I went to grade school, then high school, then spent a long time in the social ferment that opposed the Vietnam War and uplifted civil and human rights. That person still lives in me. I was in love, I got married, I got divorced, fell in love, and got married. I’ve lived in California, New York, Missouri, New Mexico. But as I grow older, the cycles don’t follow those grooves. As they grow shorter and more compressed, they intensify in impact.
The distinct phases of public life in the last half-dozen years feel like different lifetimes. I wrote last week about the changing reality for Jews and how some people like me have come to feel unwelcome or unsafe in progressive spaces that previously felt like sites of belonging. That was a change indeed.
But before that came the pandemic. It was just under six years ago that the start of COVID led to “shelter in place” orders. In the beginning when little was known and vaccines hadn’t yet been created, we lived as if the world were a place of contamination and danger was everywhere. I have vivid memories of arranging groceries on a table in our backyard so we could spray the containers with a solution of bleach. That was annoying and as I look back on it, a bitter bit of funny. I also remember how it felt when my consulting contracts were canceled by the organizations that had hired me, since public presentations and group meetings were no longer feasible. COVID triggered a big change in our social life too, as holiday gatherings, arts events, and other reasons to crowd together disappeared. Sometime in the spring of 2020, my husband and I agreed that from then on, when we have guests, instead of the big parties we hosted when we first moved to New Mexico as ways to enlarge our circle of acquaintance, we would limit gatherings to the maximum able to sustain one convivial conversation around the dinner table, usually six. That was a lasting change too.
We wonder if the years creeping up on us just happened to coincide with COVID, so that this drawing in could be seen as a predictable artifact of the aging process. The great baseball pitcher Satchel Paige said it best: “Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.” (If you haven’t heard of him, I recommend reading about a fascinating life.) When I was young and conviviality wasn’t yet understood as contagion, I rambled just as much and as enthusiastically as my peers. Nowadays I see young people having returned to all the public pursuits that were normal in the pre-COVID era, so I must conclude that it’s not just events that triggered changes in our ways of living, but the convergence of events and internal processes. I think that the pandemic surfaced a hidden truth, that Rick and I are much more reclusive than we thought, that we generally prefer to stay home.
Mostly the pandemic is perceived as past, but it casts a long shadow. We hear that children who studied via Zoom are behind their earlier counterparts in learning and socialization. We hear that vaccines will be harder to develop and share. There are plenty of reasons to worry about how the public health system under the egregious Robert Kennedy, Jr., will deal with the next pandemic should it arrive on Trump’s watch. The evolving measles story—infections multiply and the government prescribes cod liver oil—suggests something frightening to me and people who share my perspective, but evidently not to the MAGA regime. Rick and I still avoid crowded gatherings and mask up at the airport; things that used to feel normal and safe cast a sinister glow.
And that brings me to the biggest change, of course, the re-election of Trump. I had a phone conversation this morning with someone who works for the BBC. In researching a podcast, he discovered something I wrote nearly twenty years ago about the Sixties, specifically the watershed moment epitomized for me by the Rolling Stones’ 1969 conference at Altamont in California, where the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, hired to provide security, killed a young man, in some ways ending the Sixties we loved. That took me back to the optimism suffusing that time. Despite the Vietnam War and crackdowns on civil rights and other movements, many young people believed our values and desires had an impact that could spread far beyond our circles. I’m sure that is still true for a substantial number of our counterparts today, as I see them working hard to mobilize resistance. I hope they are more right than we were. I also hope their impact goes deeper. The counterculture had tremendous influence on social values and mores: if MAGA doesn’t succeed in erasing it all, the existence of same-sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana, the spread of organic food, environmental awareness, and complementary health practices will continue to be a living legacy. But we had no effect on income inequality, racism and sexism still flourish, nothing has stopped the growth of Incarceration Nation…and so on.
Looking inward, comparing how I feel amidst the rise of the MAGA regime with how I felt in 1969, it’s easy to see that one of the biggest challenges for me is moderating my incredulity so I don’t tailspin into surreal world. Last week TV acceded to Trump’s request for primetime to deliver a furious and mendacious rant. He looks vicious and mindless as he makes claims such as having lowered drug prices by 500 or more percent. (Lowering them by 100 percent would make them free; by 500 percent and the MAGA regime would have to pay you to take them.) He seems beyond deranged, naming everything in sight after himself, finding new ways to profit from his public position, issuing cruel rants, such as rejoicing in the deaths of the Reiners, from official social media accounts, deploying masked mercenaries to imprison and torture ordinary people whose crime is looking brown, obliterating environmental regulations and enforcement, lying about everything including his long record of law-breaking, including abuse of young women. I could go on, but I won’t.
I usually look at the headlines in the New York Times before I get up in the morning. These days, each one is more shameful, embarrassing, and alarming than the last. I recognize that our system of government doesn’t make it easy to replace an incompetent and evil executive if that person has somehow cowed a large majority of the elected officials who could support impeachment, stacked the Supreme Court, and populated his cabinet with self-regarding and amoral toadies who will never invoke Article 25 regardless of how mentally disabled he becomes. What checks and balances? The impact on the country and its people, on our erstwhile allies, on the environment, the economy, public safety, and human rights—all of these things are alarmingly clear. But I’m also noticing the impact on myself. Every day, I have to face my disbelief and keep it from sinking me, accepting what had once seemed impossible but not surrendering.
How are you feeling it?
When I wrote “How it Feels” last week, I got many responses from readers who thanked me for writing it, because it expressed what they had been feeling. That was encouraging, shrinking the inhibition that made it hard to write: would I be understood? Would I be attacked? As it happened, mostly yes and mostly no, in that order. That helps me go on. If you’re struggling too, it may help you to remember that behind the headlines are countless people like yourself hoping that the cracks now appearing in the MAGA regime will widen and deepen into a tidal wave of resistance that can sweep away its power. It’s a new phase, to be sure. But all the others have passed and like you, I’ll do what I can to help this one pass too. Sharing how it feels is part of that.
Al Green, “Free at Last.”