Viciously Horrible
Every time I go to post here, I’m dragged under again by the horrors. I’d post something cheerful about the WiP, but I don’t want to write. I want to scream and blame somebody, but it’s not one person, one group, it’s a whole collective mindset that’s fogged the whole damn country– all black men are dangerous, we need our guns for protection, if you’re afraid it’s okay to shoot– insane ideas that defy logic and humanity. I need to believe that things will be different, but I’m afraid they won’t. I’m aching for those lost, and I’m terrified for the future, and I should not be posting now.
But some thoughtful things have come out of this.
There’s a piece by William Saletan in Slate, “There’s a War Over Race in America, But It’s not Whites Vs. Blacks,” and I think that’s not only true, but it’s important and needs to be emphasized: Neither the majority of blacks or the majority of whites want this horror; most Americans are against this nightmare. And there’s something else that was a tiny ray of light in what seems to be endless night: another Slate article quotes Newt Gingrich saying, “It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this. If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.” If Newt Gingrich, the closest thing to embodiment of Republican Evil next to Dick Cheney, can say that, then maybe, maybe there’s a chance, and maybe this week hasn’t been a complete horror, maybe it’ll be the wake-up call this country needs. Because the massacre of twenty little kids in their schoolrooms wasn’t. And slaughtering forty-nine people who were laughing and dancing wasn’t. But maybe this time . . .
Right now it’s just horror. There will be a cheerful Cherry Saturday tomorrow. I wrote it months ago when I was cheerful. I’ll be cheerful again. But right now, it just isn’t in me. My country is bleeding, everything I believe this country stands for is under attack, and it’s been going on for decades, getting worse for decades. I want to talk about Shakespeare and about writing and about the dogs and about this wasp that invaded my bedroom, but I just can’t get there right now. This is not the America I believe in, but it’s the America I’m living in. And I hate it.
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