I’m sitting in the cheap seats with a distant but clear view of the drama playing out at my neighbor’s place south of the border. I have no stake in the show, nothing personally riding on it and yet I am riveted to the spectacle. I can hardly believe what I’m watching – if a person were to write a novel with as many twists and turns and ups and downs it would be so unbelievable no one would buy it.
The characters in this drama flit from one crisis to the next before anyone has a chance to catch their breath. Their performances are intense but have become predictable – arrogance, disgust, shock, betrayal, indigence. Their predicaments pop up at such a frantic pace it makes my head spin. Nothing is ever resolved. I can’t blink lest I lose my spot in a plot that thickens daily.
I wonder at times if a person needs the distance of the cheap seats to be able to keep the story straight, perhaps those in the midst of the chaos and cacophony are unable to see the bigger picture.
I worry about how the dust will settle when this shit show is over, or if it will even be over when it’s supposed to be over. You can’t un-hear rhetoric, you can’t un-feel discord. I worry that dissension is contagious, that it will become acceptable and so commonplace we will stop caring about the causes of it. I worry that we will stop listening to each other. I worry that it will be okay to turn a deaf ear.
In the olden days a pandemic, massive forest fires and extreme weather would be enough to cause a sleepless night or two – add to this my current view from the cheap seats and I find myself holding my breath. What was once laughable has become terrifying and seems to grow more so every day.
During this past week the turmoil has hit a fever pitch. On Tuesday there was the disastrous television debate where the current president of the United States made an ass of himself and put his extreme supporters on alert to ‘Stand By’. On Thursday one of the closest aides to that president tested positive for Covid-19, by early Friday morning the president and his wife tested positive as well. Immediately conspiracy theories flooded the internet.
If my head was spinning before I’m positively dizzy now – I’m on information overload. My first instinct is to treat the president with the same lack of empathy and consideration that he bestows on his fellow Americans. But that is not who I am. That is not who we are. If we join the fight and only sling insults, there is no way forward. This is not complacency. This is not indigence or indifference. This is an acknowledgment that we cannot keep doing the same things and expect different results.