What Doesn’t Kill You…
You know the rest of that expression. I suggest that we are living in a bimodal world right now where some things that don’t kill you do, indeed, make you stronger, and others that don’t kill you, make you weaker. After 650 blog stories in eighteen months, representing approximately 800,000 words or about nine books worth, I know a few things about my writing, which I now do every single day. The first thing I know is that this literary forced march has me writing a great deal about what has happened to me and the world over my sixty-six years (autobiography is a monkey on every writer’s back I suspect). The second thing I know is that what is on my mind every day when I sit before the keyboard is a direct function to what is happening around and to me. The three biggest things that are happening around and to me right now are, in this order, my “retirement” to Southern California and what that does to my daily activities, the Coronavirus changes to life as we know it especially in terms of social interactions, and the political environment of a world and country gone mad, especially under the banner (note I do NOT say leadership) of Donald J. Trump as evidenced by the dichotomy of good versus evil in the battle for our collective souls.
There are days when my hands are in the dirt and that is what permeates my mind and my writing. There are days when my mind is in the cloudy mists of the past or history and all I want to write is about Genghis Khan or my days in a tropical valley in Costa Rica. And other days my soul is offended, uplifted or just struggling with the events of the day as shown to me by cable news (mostly a combination of MSNBC, CNN and NBC News). But my writing, in whichever direction it takes me on any given day, is how I unburden myself for two purposes; to provide an outlet for my pain and pleasure, and to share with others the observations of life as I witness them, in hopes that, as they say, there is a pony somewhere amongst all the horseshit.
This morning, while reading the daily political/historical musings of Heather Cox Richardson, it suddenly struck me that as we see President Trump once again flailing on Twitter and Fox News in the pain of his severely sinking prospects for reelection and his inevitable waning of status, respect and legal standing, there may be a pony in the offing. What hasn’t killed us, may make us stronger. Maybe Trump was sent to us (or perhaps better said, foisted upon us) for a reason. Since Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, our country has been visibly cleaving and over the fifty years, like any drip, drip, drip on rock, the foundation of our society is breaking apart and, as any nation divided, cannot stand. I am among the people who believe that Donald Trump is the embodiment of all the wrong things in our country and society. He is a cartoonish reflection of our lesser selves. He represents what the tantrum-prone side of us as kindergarteners wants to be. We all occasionally in life have wanted to stamp our petulant feet to get what we want whether deserved or not. We have all lied to avoid detection and to prove whatever nonsense has come out of our mouths in a moment of weakness. We have all wanted to pull the pigtails of the little girls and waggle our weenies in a reaffirmation of our virility. But unlike Donald Trump, we were mostly not overindulged as children to the point of thinking that we could get away with whatever we wanted and proceed on our way regardless of our bad acts. There is no escaping the fact that most of us were simply raised better than Donald Trump was raised. Seventy-four years is a long time to get away with murder, but Donald Trump is the proof that there are always exceptions to each and every rule. He is the outlier, not in a good way, but rather in an exceptional way at an exceptional moment in world history. But he may, indeed, make us stronger for it all.
I have great hope that under Donald J. Trump, our country has been forced to realize that it still harbors deep-seeded feelings or racism and anti-immigrant fears. We are too materialistic and greedy and often care too much about accumulating more and more for ourselves and our descendants. We have ignored (I refuse to suggest that we have lost) our humanity and forgotten the tenets of our religious imperatives to be good Samaritan’s, to turn the other cheek, to follow the Golden Rule. Donald Trump has reminded us every single day for almost five years now that we are a flawed species that needs to work hard to be better and do the right things. Like dogs getting their noses rubbed in their own poop on the rug, we are all chastised now of how bad we can be if given free license. The growing majority of us are finally coming around to this realization and will move towards a better moral ground. He hasn’t killed us and he seems to be making us stronger.
Now the other big current event in our collective lives is our friend COVID-19. It has largely cost us our 2020 and may take a sizable piece of both our 2021 and our lifestyle as we knew it. It has been suggested and I have noted that the good thing that could come out of the novel Coronavirus is a refocus on public health standards that are increasingly necessary in a world with 8 billion humans and more. It would be easy to suggest that if we survive the virus, we will find that immunity that we seek and we will be stronger going forward, but I fear that would be the wrong conclusion to reach from this. The Coronavirus in its latest surge across the Southern and Western states of the U.S. is now claiming more than 70,000 infections per day and climbing. What’s that overused word again, oh yeah, unprecedented. Now that the predictions by the professional pandemic folks (like Anthony Fauci) are proving more and more true every day (he predicted the daily infection rate going to 100,000), the Trump administration wants to refute the predictions about the concomitant death rate. Stats would suggest that 4,700 of those infected people will die. I’ve done the math on that in a prior story and let’s just say that the prediction is that there will be a multiple of the current death total of 136,000 before this is over and probably by the time of the election. There is no sign on the horizon yet that we should be feeling optimistic that this is coming to an end soon or that our lives are returning to their prior patterns. In fact, this may be a case of what doesn’t kill you today, kills you tomorrow or weakens you and kills you later from something else that got weakened by this damn virus.
What this has all gotten me to thinking is that we will survive Donald Trump and may be able to turn that pile of lemons into lemonade, but I just don’t think this pandemic is going to leave us unscathed. It has certainly been a wake-up call for many of us who assumed away the worst of infectious diseases. I have spent enough time in the most infectious emerging market countries where all manner of bugs can crawl into your system and I must admit to a degree of feeling impervious. Not so with COVID-19. I hate being in the “vulnerable” category as someone over sixty-five, someone with hypertension and not exactly at fighting weight. It has never made me feel vulnerable before and now it does.