Dr. Strangemom (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog)

5780 In The Books

I don't know how I am supposed to do Yom Kippur this year.

Oh, I'm evaluating my deeds, as we are instructed to do; I'm looking at where I've fallen down on the job, asking forgiveness from those I have wronged.

Except this: I am not going to ask forgiveness for hating. And even worse: I don't even want to stop hating.

Yeah, I know that hate only diminishes me and love is the answer and blah blah blah, but to everything (turn turn turn) there is a season. And this season of Republican fascism, religious fanaticism and cruel injustice foments hate in me. 

I don't feel like praying; I feel like fighting. I feel like fighting dirty.

Who by fire, who by water...Leonard Cohen's song, taken from the High Holydays liturgy. This week is the time of reckoning; all our deeds of the past year are examined and written on our permanent records. We have until sundown at Yom Kippur to make things right -there are no extensions or hall passes. We can't say we had cramps. Can't say we were at a funeral. We can't even say that we were in temple for a Jewish holiday (this, an excuse so beautifully bulletproof in a gentile world that it absolutely proves we are The Chosen People.)

This week I am called to search my soul. And so I am doing it, but not because I want to make sure I will not die by fire or water or smoke or pandemic or a knee on my throat; I'm doing it because it's a worthy endeavor. I got some transgressions I could clean up. God sees all, and Robin is going to get hip to my shit sooner or later. 

So I've been searching. I've been poking around in there, moving around the boxes of guilt and photographs and shoulder pads and my old Mary McCaslin albums and painful memories, and hope and joy so I can see into most abandoned cobwebby corners. Looking for forgiveness. Looking for love for all humankind.

And I have come to the the conclusion that this year, I'm going down with a lot of F's and "needs to improve"s on my report card. I might not even pass 5780. Oh dear Lord, please don't make me repeat this year.

 I do not have love in my heart for all humankind. I just can't muster it. I have enormous love in my heart for some of humankind. I love every single person who is going to vote the Democratic ticket. I love almost everyone who wears a mask when they go out. I love critical thinkers and scientists, and I have nothing but love for all animals. Except nutria. Nutria weird the fuck out of me and if I had to chose between saving the life of a baby nutria or saving the life of baby Mitch McConnell, well, of course I would save the nutria. But I'd probably throw up afterwards.

I could be wrong, but I am going to let myself hate for now. If my hate feeds my awareness and my awareness feeds my actions and deeds, then, you know, bless the fuel.

The last line to that Leonard Cohen song is, "...and who is calling..."

Maybe it doesn't matter who is calling. 
As long as I answer.

 

 

 

 

If The Smoke Clears

The air quality in Portland is 502 today.

I have no idea what that means scientifically, but I can tell you that it feels apocalyptic.

I am in a state of mind somewhere between heartland stoicism, urban investigative curiosity and coastal denial. I follow the air quality numbers like a day trader on coke, yet I do not look out the window. 

Not that I could see anything if I did look out the window. No visibility. All smoke. Fire. Covid. Racism. 

That night, a million years ago, when Trump won, my son Zach said to me on the phone, "Well, democracy is over." And I told him that he was being an alarmist.

If he was, he comes by it honestly. Alarmism runs in the veins of a few of our family tree's leaves. During the pogroms in Russia, it worked for us because it got us the hell outta there. In the 21st century, however, with no pogroms from which to flee, the alarmist siren in me tends to go off at somewhat less urgencies. Like when I run out of vanilla coffee creamer. Or I lose my phone.

Until now.

Yesterday, I was talking to Zach on the phone and I apologized for calling him an alarmist that election night. I said, "but, fuuuuuck, did you ever think it would be this bad?"

He answered, "Yes. What do you think fascism looks like?"

And I looked out the window.

Fascism is not just a word or an insult or an easy way to describe authoritarianism. Fascism, I see now, is a breakdown of everything. No safety net. No one answering phones in federal offices. No prisoners to fight the California fires because the prisons are Covid incubators because the Republicans in power aren't doing a damn thing about the pandemic. Fascism is no response from the motherfucking president when the Oregon governor calls him over and over again, needing relief for our state. Which is unlivable right now. We are choking over here.

I have never felt so expendable in my life as I do today.

Fascism is not orderly like a parade of goose-stepping brownshirts; it's chaotic. It's right-wing vigilantes stopping evacuees in their cars because they believe that antifa is starting the fires here and they - ignorant, crazed, armed - have given themselves the power to search us for suspicious items in our cars.

So, no, Zach was not being an alarmist. He had read history. 

And it breaks my fucking heart that my child, my children, your children, all of us are seeing it all play out in 2020. I hope we understand that the unraveling didn't start in 2020, however. Or in 2016. Or before that. Unraveling is a slow process, requiring patience and strategy. It can fly under the radar until it's nearly complete.

November is around the corner and now, so many displaced West coast residents from the fires, I worry how those people will vote. How will they get their mail-in ballots? This just adds to the plethora of voter suppression tactics going on in the country.

Fascism.

And I am against it.

I am ANTI fascism, you ugly knuckle-dragging, uneducated, spittle-spewing, unAmerican, puffed up, wanna-be action figures with accessories sold separately.

Being against fascism is the most American thing a person can be.

So when the smoke clears - if the smoke ever clears - and I can return to being terrified and enraged by the fact that there is a runaway pandemic over us, that babies are still in ICE jail, that black lives still do not matter, that our natural resources are still in peril, that education is still being Betsy'ed to death, that our social infrastructure is still cracking under the federal leadership of hate and greed, well, then I am going to go outside (wearing my mask. Because God is not going to protect me from Covid. God is so over all the asinine declarations about Her works. The one where the MAGAs credit Her for bringing Trump to them has really pissed Her the fuck off), and start screaming again.

Louder this time.