Doing Time in My Mind

“Trump embodies the decayed soul of America. He, like many of those who support him, has a childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the gods. This impossibility, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to a dark alternative: destroying like the gods.” Chris Hedges

My children were born one day apart, September 3 and 4, five years apart. My son is now 21, my daughter 16. The United States has been at war in Afghanistan my daughter’s entire life. My son was born during the Clinton administration, which, politically, seems a very long time ago. When my son was two or so, the Lewinsky scandal broke and the GOP controlled Congress went after Bill Clinton with a vengeance. The Puritanical streak lodged in the American psyche kicked in and day after day the news was full of lurid speculation about semen stains on a blue GAP dress and Bill Clinton’s insatiable libido. For telling fibs about a blowjob, Clinton was impeached. Today a ridiculous man who fibs spectacularly all the time about damn near everything sits in the Oval Office.  

We have to live in the present but cannot forget the past. Around my children’s birthdays I always think about the passage of time. I think about markers, significant events like birthday parties, graduation ceremonies, Christmases. I think about who I was and who I am, and I wonder if time is my nemesis or my friend. In my day to day life time feels like a weight I haul around. I’m at an age where there is likely more of life behind than ahead. I despair a little when I think of all the books I will never read, the places I may never see. Instead of expanding, my viewpoint seems to wither and shrink. I wonder if something is wrong with me. To look back at one’s life with regret -- and ahead with trepidation -- can’t be healthy. I also think about people I’ve known who have died, and as the years pass the number grows. I see the effects of time on people all around me, in Trader Joe’s on Sunday afternoon, in line at the movie theater: arthritic fingers, swollen feet and ankles, bent backs, mottled skin, gray hair. Evidence of Time’s merciless toll is everywhere. Every human will suffer. Such is the nature of existence. For the most part, we receive no instruction in dealing with the nature of our existence.

Funny how the certainty of youth, the clarity of right and wrong, just and unjust, becomes the doubt of middle age. My son is far less of a fool than I was at his age. At 21 I was serving my third year in the Air Force, in Japan, and because I could sustain myself I felt like a grown-up when in reality I was still an immature, hot-headed boy. In my mind the memory of that time is sepia and dim. I spent hours riding trains, and when I wasn’t riding I was walking, from the train station to my tiny apartment, from the station to the front gate of Yokota Air Base. How many miles? I have journals from that time that I have carted from Japan to Honolulu, and from Honolulu to Seattle, to Irvine in Orange County, and then back home to Santa Barbara, that I refuse to read for fear of embarrassment. I should pile them in the backyard and set them on fire, and one day, perhaps I will. When you’re a hot-headed, foolish young man as I was, you do things that hurt yourself, but also others.

My children will make their way in a world radically different from the one in which I made mine. I fear for them. First, because they are already casualties of a failed economic system. Second, and intimately linked to the first, because of the real prospect of catastrophic climate change. And third, because of the invasive power of the US surveillance state. The balance of power between the government and the governed has never been so out of kilter, and unaccountable power is terrifying. But even more I fear for my children because of the strong undercurrent of cruelty that is loose in our land. As the US has become more fearful of losing its hegemony around the world, compassion for its own citizens has atrophied. Instead of a helping hand, more often than not only a clenched fist is offered.

I feel sad for the people of Bangladesh, Houston, and parts of the Caribbean, who have been severely harmed by natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. It pains me that my country has for so long been so two-faced and craven about our environment, fixated on economic gain and geopolitical advantage to the exclusion of human life.