Pay Attention
I teach my students The Sound of Music,
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis; I tell them people
fail to see disaster coming. They’re busy living
their quotidian lives — a daughter who isn’t eating,
a mother who falls in the shower, a partner who turns
to the bottle more often these days — worrying.
The home still needs cleaning, the laundry
still needs washing, and the meals are endless —
must they really be fed three times a day?
Dishes dishes dishes. And everything costs
a little more than it ought to, and we live in America,
so we hope we don’t get sick, not too sick, anyway,
because we really don’t know how we’d handle that.
Maybe it’s not surprising that one month
into this presidency, I’m living in two different worlds.
In one, my friends and I are reading the news regularly,
obsessively, searching out sources that will help
make sense of what looks like sheer nonsense —
Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure.
Trying desperately to figure out what each one of us can do
to get some water to our street, to help put out this fire.
We’re bewildered by what is no longer a normal
(normal for America in this era, anyway) shift of power,
from one side to the obstructive other, but instead
a wholesale attempt to restructure the fundamental
order of the country. Some of us are more pessimistic
than others; some of us saw this coming, some didn’t.
Maybe the courts will hold the line, maybe the governors
will step up, maybe a few Republicans in Congress
will hear their constituents’ pain and realize their jobs
are at risk; maybe they’ll revisit their conscience.
And on top of all that, there’s the fact that the president
and his chief advisor are not putting forward a coherent
strategy, but instead, are running around like drunken
toddlers who have been given the keys to the country.
Their lack of strategy may be a good thing,
but the uncertainty is hard to take.
That world is nightmare, and is keeping us up nights.
So when we turn to our mundane tasks, it’s often with
a sense of relief. Oh, yes. The temperature’s dropped
below zero; I can get up early to drive the kids in; oh yes,
I can get up even earlier to make something delicious
for our daughter’s lunch, to tempt her to eat at school
instead of just skipping meals, oh yes, it is hard, but also
such a relief to actually have clear tasks, clear rewards.
Focusing on the everyday tasks helps keep me sane,
for a little while, until I go back to reading the news again.
There’s another world, though, where people aren’t
paying attention to the national stage. I’m having
a hard time knowing how to talk to them;
our conversations feel surreal.
“The house is on fire!”
“Oh, you think so? It does seem a little warm today.”
In college, I went to campus sit-ins, but really didn’t
pay much attention to politics beyond my little patch.
In my twenties, thirties, forties, I grew increasingly aware
of larger issues — but often just one or two at a time.
I just wasn’t paying that much attention — the world
was so big; the news was so confusing. It was too hard
to get a handle on. I needed to figure out what I
was going to do with my life, how I’d pay off my student
loans and my credit card debt, and would I be stuck
in this terrible job for the rest of my life, and did he
really love me? Then babies, and cancer, and…
…so I can sort of understand. Most of my college
students aren’t paying attention, and I get that.
But it’s been a little shocking, how many people I know
aren’t paying attention, when our country’s on fire.
Maybe they just don’t want to talk to me about it. Maybe
they think they know what I’d say — they probably do —
and they don’t want to hear it. And I get that for the woman
sitting beside me on the bar stool at the airport, who’s
just coming back from her best friend’s funeral. She
doesn’t want to talk politics, and I don’t blame her.
There are days when I don’t want to talk politics either,
even though it’s a constant hammering refrain in my head.
But some of my friends, liberal friends, are oddly silent.
Some of them think I’m taking it all too seriously.
They refuse to admit that we’re really going off the rails;
they don’t seem to notice that people are getting hurt,
people are losing jobs, people don’t know how they’re
going to make rent, people are actually dying, have already
died, in just this one month, because of this terrible,
unprecedented, wildly unpredictable situation.
Maybe our social conditioning is too strong; they’re
hoping that if they avoid conflict, things will settle down.
Maybe it’s just too frightening, to look at it all straight on.
I want to be understanding.
But if I’m honest, I’m running out of patience.
And we’re running out of time.
2/24/25
