This Nation is Broken
It’s the 21st century. Why do we keep on repeating the same
catastrophic mistakes in our collective human history?
(Dec. 25, 2020 - 7:30 a.m.)
It’s Christmas morning and I awoke with these words in my mind:
This nation is broken.
And then I remembered the TV images of millions of people in cars waiting hours in long lines at food banks. The last story I’d read before making Christmas Eve dinner — the Washington Post article about callers who couldn’t believe Trump and the Republicans had abruptly held up the once-imminent $900 billion coronavirus relief aid package. Will he sign it on Monday? Will unemployment be extended or not? Will the government be shut down?
Telling their stories of losing homes and their cars, some callers were breaking down and crying. Fears of starving. Of just wanting to live.
I cried, too, at my desk. How can this be?
But before I even read that story, I was in the supermarket earlier in the day, buying one or two items I’d forgotten, rushing, huffing along the aisles in my mask. Something made me just want to start sobbing. My mask could easily hide it.
I don’t know what it was. I am not in dire straits like others are.
But I know they are out there, and I cannot see them. I know they are there, and I feel broken. The empty darkened multiplex cinema parking lot, that used to be teeming with cars and families on the weekend. The empty entertainment districts in hotspot neighborhoods in cities along I-95.
What is happening? There’s deep sobs inside. Lurking, like the kind I had when I first heard Biden had won. At first tears of joy, sobs as if being released from some trauma. I haven’t felt this way for decades. But somehow from my past experience, I knew the relief would be shortlived.
IS it because 74 million Americans voted for someone who another 81 million believe is either a malignant narcissist, a sociopath, demented, a criminal, a liar, a misogynist, a white supremacist, an authoritarian bent on committing a self-coup, and/or a combination of one or more of the above?
Coupled with the crisis state of affairs since Nov. 3, I’ve literally been unable to dream of a white Christmas. I have just spent half Christmas Eve awakening to the rumbling, wind gusts up to 60 mph and checking my Weather Channel app for the latest storm alert, tracking one of those odd straightline winter nor’easters which had tornadoes in the southern Atlantic states and were headed up our way. So much technology to inform us and avert disasters, but some things we cannot change.
What was that odd boom? A trash can rolling around? The tell-tale sound of a train rolling by? There are no Metro-North tracks in my neighborhood. A tornado supposedly souns like a train thundering by. Is it off in the distance, getting closer?
I live in the Northeast, not the tornado alley where I grew up. I check my weather app radar to see what “past” storm weather was like. What the future holds (the next six hours).
I reread the latest Storm Warning. Should I really be in bed on the second floor? The last paragraph says something about staying on the lower levels of my dwelling and away from windows. I don’t want to be in there my pajamas, in case I have to take shelter in the 1940s plaster-walled bathroom, like the last time.
The last time I saw a message like that, it was back in the summer. In ALL CAPS: TAKE SHELTER NOW! TORNADO CONDITIONS PRESENT IN NORWALK, WESTPORT, BETHEL … I’d better call my friends!
I didn’t get to finish reading the sentence. Right then, a big BOOM – just outside my house!
My neighbor’s 500-year-old old oak tree across the street smashed right onto my driveway! I’d just been out there 20 minutes before, had gotten the mail. The Weather app said it would hit the area at 2 p.m. and I had thought I would go and run out and get the mail BEFORE then. How oddly accurate!
A wayward branch dangled on the electrical and cable TV wires along the street, cutting power. My cell phone began pinging with texts. Without leaving my home I learned through my neighborhood group text which homes were affected — just our block. Another tree was down at the other end of the street, too.
Afterwards, neighbors came by to see the damage. One told me he saw the clouds swirling just above our houses. Not until he told me that did I realize the tall tulip poplar behind my home had had its top ripped off. But none of the other trees in the woods just behind the stone fence were damaged, some 100 feet away. I’d wanted to cut down that poplar tree because it’s too close to the house and would grow to be 70–90 feet tall, a threat in future storms that never used to be so violent.
Since I was a kid, I’d have recurring dreams of fleeing a tornado. But seven years, ago, the dream became six tornadoes at once. Just before I started hearing about storms with multiple tornadoes, in the news!
The weather is broken. So much is broken.
And apparently some 74 million others voted for Trump and that is a shocking number. They fail to see his personality flaws and psychopathology.
Why is it that so many fail to see his lack of empathy, his lies, his selfishness and need for self-aggrandizement? So much of his behavior is what parents try to steer their children away from.
Yet it seems too many are fine with this type of dysfunctional behavior, which, from my past experience I now recognize as abusive and similar to domestic abuse or hostage taking. After months of delays, Trump’s last-minute veto threat of relief aid, demanding $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the compromise $600, is just cruel game-playing. If he really cared about anyone other than himself, he would been involved months ago. The Democrats had wanted $2,000 in stimulus checks back in the summer. But in my humble opinion, Trump doles out favors that gratify him, like a child molester doling out candy to children.
Trump’s failure to concede to President-elect Joe Biden is part of this dysfunctional syndrome of abuse and neglect. Trump’s enablers and his supporters have hung their hat on authoritarianism, choosing to be a party of Trump, rather than to be a party of the American people. They have chosen a cult leader rather than loyalty to their party, much less the country.
Why are so many Americans defending this destructive, authoritarian behavior? What does this say about the mental health of our nation?
Is mental health the last frontier for societal advancement, now that 500 years of economic globalization has manifested for Western Civilization’s dominance on the world stage? It seems that today, with advanced communications technology, we have the information and tools to share information and resources anywhere in the world to avert the worst aspects of scarcity, to help one another before man-made catastrophes develop.
WE need to stop looking so short-sightedly at today’s problems. In our collective human history, our prehistoric ancestors’ prerogative for survival in times of scarcity was the strength of their clans and tribes. They knew so little about the world and life was perilous, dependent on sheer survivalism and sense of unified cooperation/mission. From our earliest hominid ancestors who began to walk upright some 3 million to 4 million years ago to the evolution of Homo Sapiens, modern humans 200,000 years ago all on the continent of Africa, our basic needs for clean water, food, shelter from predators, Mother Nature and even other competing clans and tribes consumed every aspect of daily living — until the present age.
In our more recent recorded history, before the advent of industrial revolution and technology, our collective ancestors’ survival depended on economic trade, reliant on alliances and ever more superior weapons of military conquest, empire building, colonization, slavery — and even genocide.
Only a few generations ago, it was difficult to communicate with others across great distances to avert conflicts over scarce resources or in times of natural disaster.
Today in the 21st century of advanced instant communications technology, we know so much about the world and about helping each other meet our basic human needs, to create a world far more safe and compassionate than our ancestors ever knew. We can and should be on the cusp of truly making the world a better place.
But first it requires recognizing that This Nation is Broken. We, as a People, are Still Broken. We are not able to live up to our full potential and create the truly loving world, that we and our ancestors have craved for millennia. The question we should be asking is Why? No more blaming. No more shaming. No more guilt-shifting. We need to look deeply into our long history, shared history on this planet. We are indeed a global family in need of healing.
And as I write these words, I hear the FBI is now investigating a bomb explosion in Nashville, Tennessee’s entertainment district at 6:30 a.m.
And it’s only 12 noon on what is supposed to be a holy day.
Happy Holidays. Merry Christmas. More later.
