Let's roll...

The calls, emails, texts, and Facebook inquiries started rolling in Tuesday evening as the election was clearly going south… by midnight it was clear what had happened and I was, like so many of you, physically ill. I went to bed knowing that there would be no good news in the morning.

I saw the trend, did the math, knew the truth.

I slept lightly, tossing and turning, and after a few minutes of troubled dreams I’d wake and then reality would punch me in the gut: “Trump has won.”

And I’d want to puke.

I know that feeling so well… it was exactly what I experienced the night of the day Richard died… after troubled dreams I’d wake and then reality would punch me in the gut: “Richard is dead.”

And I’d want to puke.

But honestly? It was worse. Can you believe that? Trump winning the White House was more horrible to me than the death of my beloved husband.

I thought I was nuts… “Get a grip, Maureen…” I told myself and I felt guilty. Really, really guilty. What could be worse than losing Richard? It was absurd. I chalked it up to being too much to bear in so short of a time. I told myself I only felt such despair because the election fell so close to Richard’s death.  Profound grief screws you up profoundly.

But Trump evokes fear and grief for my nation. It is worse than any sense of loss I have ever felt.  Quite frankly, I’ve never known fear like this. My training in history is not particularly helpful.

However, I didn’t have much time for introspection (more will certainly come later) because Wednesday  is one of the 3 days a week  I teach a unique, specialized course to high school students, “The History of Medicine” -- so I gulped coffee and checked emails, Facebook and text messages. I couldn’t bear to put on the news so I didn’t… I couldn’t bear to see Hillary concede and Trump bask in victory.

I shuffled through my class notes, tried to focus on the day’s lecture, what discussions I needed to provoke, and made a note to follow through on getting updates from each student about their research projects. I had a lot to squeeze into a 50-minute class.

I tried hard to focus on the immediate moment but my mind kept returning to both the future and the past…

Then I saw the passport renewal form that I’d downloaded sitting there on my desk… and that nauseated feeling returned. I wasn’t planning a vacation; I’d been seriously thinking about fleeing the land of my birth in the event of a Trump victory. I honestly thought it was a very, very long shot that would ever happen.

It was hard to imagine leaving the nation that all of the men in my family fought to preserve since the very first days they arrived from a land dying from a catastrophic politically-induced famine…. Yeah: My Irish stock goes back to the Civil War. We were on the right side of history then and have been ever since.

No matter how I tried, I could not shake my grief and sense of dread.

My father wouldn’t believe this… Omaha Beach, Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Dachau… he wouldn’t believe this! Dad used to laugh about “SNAFUS,” a term I never understood until he finally clued me in when I was old enough to be clued in… “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.”

“There’s Nothing Normal about how Fucked Up we are now, Dad.” For the first time since he died I actually told him I was glad he was gone.

It was as if I’d gone to bed in America and during the night there’d been a coup like they have in a banana republic or an attack by a foreign power and now the nation was awakening to the horrifying news that some horrible power had seized our government.

I said it before but on Wednesday it had a terrifying new urgency: “You don’t want to be the last Jew out of Berlin.”

I stood at the sink, rinsed my coffee cup, and told Richard I was glad he was dead too because what had just happened would have killed him.

Another thought crept in… How long did the Jews pretend? How long did they continue with the rituals of daily living… dressing for work, washing the clothes, reading bed time stories to the kids, lighting Shabbat candles… how long? How long?

How do you know when the borders are going to be closed? When are you just too damn old to climb over the mountains in the middle of the night? Will you know when you will be arrested… How?

Yes, Trump had brought me to THAT…

One last look at Facebook before I walked out the door told me I had another message; it was from a woman I don’t know but who is somehow a FB friend. She was in a panic; she confided her husband and brother are here illegally. They work very and support her and the kids; she can’t make it without them. She asked if it “is true” there are going to be Immigration Police? She wanted to know if I thought they should all go back now. Please, she asked, tell me if you know…

Good Lord; how the hell do I know?

Then in rapid succession I received text messages from close friends: one Jewish, one gay and the other travelling outside the country. They all wanted to know the same thing we were all asking:

“What the hell has happened to us?!”

Grief and fear… so much grief and fear…

I had to get to class… it had become one of the rituals of my daily living now. “Thank God it’s not U.S. history…” I thought. I pitied the teachers going into those classes on Wednesday all over America.

I should have known better. I should have known A LOT better: My students were waiting.

What are the odds that in a small class of less than 10 a teacher has 2 teens who are transgender? What are the odds? As if life is not tough enough just being a teenager without such challenges, right? Can you imagine being one of those kids living in Trump World?

I saw those 2 first when I walked into the room. Normally ebullient, they were pale, exhausted looking, and subdued.  And then the class seemed to erupt all at once: They pounced on me – What did I think? Was I worried? How the “fuck” did this happen? Words they don’t usually speak in class came tumbling out.

It was an explosion of outrage, confusion and most of all fear.

Everyone has someone they worried about as much as they worried about themselves. This is not a culturally diverse school; we are White Bread Maine but it’s telling how every single kid worried about gays, lesbians and transgender people, they worried about Maine’s few blacks and Portland’s Somali community who are not just black but also immigrants and tend to be Muslim (one kid said “that’s like the perfecta of being super screwed”), they worried about Jews, Wiccans, and also the disabled.

We’ve just begun to discuss eugenics and coercive sterilization and euthanasia in class and so questions turned to that: Did I think we’d ever again have eugenic boards that would forcibly sterilize people? One girl is very concerned about autistic people. I suspect she has a close relative who struggles with that. She knows what the Nazis did to people it deemed “defective.” She was not going to let that happen. “Over my dead body” she said with a force that surprised me.

They all thought Trump was a pervert.

“How can a pervert become president?”

One boy correctly pointed out what would happen to any other guy who grabbed women’s genitals.

“What about Russia? Do you think it’s true about Russia?”

“Do you know the Ku Klux Klan endorsed him?”

“How the hell did this happen?”

"He doesn't even believe in global warming!"

One guy said grimly, “my mom cried all night” and another announced gravely “this must be like when people heard Kennedy was shot.” A girl said “my mom said it’s like 9/11” and another informed us her grandfather told her once that he was only 7 when Pearl Harbor was attacked and she announced “he knew it changed his life forever.”

“...changed his life forever…”

That ricocheted around the room like a gun shot.

They wanted me to assure them Donald Trump has not changed their lives “forever.”

I was overwhelmed and said so. You cannot lie to teenagers. They see through it immediately. There can be no baby-talk assurances that there are no boogey men under the bed. They will look at you like you are a total moron and they will be right: you are a total moron if you talk to them like that.

I’d never lie to those kids for several reasons. Obviously, they would see through me immediately and toss me to the curb like just another adult asshole, but most of all because I respect them so much. They truly deserve better. The kids in my class are kind, caring, and smart. I am honored that they like me (incredibly, one student once said “I love you Maureen!” in a moment of teenage dramatic hyperbole – but while I know I’ll never forget that moment, I also know she’s probably forgotten it already – which is as it should be).

No, I will not betray their trust and I refuse to be just another adult asshole -- but I cannot harm them further so the truth still needs to be doled out with hope... and after all, why shouldn't it be? As much as I feel it possible to predict the future now, reason also tells me I really cannot.

I had no well of personal hope in which to dip so I found hope in the voices of the truly great. First I shared my favorite Martin Luther King saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Of course there had to be FDR’s words that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Then I took them back even further to the sanctity of a bloody battlefield of the Civil War, the place where  Lincoln spoke of a great task remaining before a divided people and consoled them by telling them that those who had given the “full measure… shall not have died in vain…” and I shared how Lincoln led his nation into hope by encouraging them to look to a higher power and dig deep into their own good character so that they might enjoy a “new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

There was one thing I avoided and it was any discussion about the Fall of Rome or any other of the many civilizations that have fallen and perished.  There may be time for that someday, but not now.

For now it is only for me to know about those cataclysmic events.

Shadow is allowed to come to school with me which is wonderful. He adores the kids and they adore him – not only those in my class but all the students. You’d be surprised how often some stressed out teenager kneels down and wraps himself or herself around Shadow’s study frame. The kid will say sheepishly “Oh I love this dog so much” or “I really need to hug him right now.”

Shadow loves it and instinctively leans into those kids. Then with a great sense of pride he looks at me with those large brown soulful all-knowing eyes and says “See mom, see how this kid needs me?”

I see it. The whole faculty sees it.  The kids see it. And this past Wednesday Shadow was endlessly hugged, squeeze, pet and even kissed. We all needed it.

I didn’t hear a single kid boast about Trump’s victory but one girl informed us that her dad voted for Trump and announced that she told her father she hates him now.

“No, no, you can’t say that to your father ever. You need to apologize to him. Please.”

She said chillingly, “But my dad betrayed his own daughter.” I managed to extract a weak promise that she’d try to talk to her dad and work it out because of course he loves her and she loves him. She listened but her emotions were raw and she wasn’t ready to give in… but I suspect she’ll come around.

The pain runs so deep. The Civil War, oh the Civil War… And then there was Berlin and before all of that there was Rome…

I can’t even keep the history straight I am so rattled.  All those ruined families… all those human tragedies…

So it went. Shadow did his bit and I did mine – and the other faculty did theirs – and the kids even did theirs.

Then Shadow and I went home and he followed me into my office and saw me pick up that half-completed passport renewal application – and watched as I tore it to pieces.

“Shad, we’re not going anywhere buddy boy. Everyone has to die somewhere and this country is our home and you and I are going to die here. If the adults leave, those kids are really screwed.”

He knew that already.

And so this is my response to your calls, emails, text and Facebook messages: I’m not going to any foreign country.

God Bless all of us – but most of all our children.

Now, let’s roll.

We have a helluva’ lot of work to do.

______________________

Note: I have not failed to notice that today is Veterans Day. Originally called Armistice Day to commemorate the end of “The Great War” (not yet called WWI since no one knew there would be a WWII), it was later expanded to include all veterans of all the services and all the wars in our history (thus, “Veterans Day”).

If you are old enough to read this blog then you are already a veteran of something… life is a war zone and that is the truth.