Resurrection

On the inside looking out...once upon a time.

Through dumb luck or inordinate cunning, the bird pictured above made its way into our house back in October, 2016, and made itself at home until I opened all the doors and shooed it out. Since then, the bird has been--as you can see in the video below-- beating its head against the window to get back in. If there is an ornithologist in the readership who wants to conduct forensics to prove that the bird in the picture and the one in video are not the same bird, be my guest. But I’m claiming this bird for metaphorical purposes, so if you can prove it’s not one and the same bird, I’ll invoke my poetic license and overrule your science. 
The bird is my metaphor for Democrats, liberals, progressives…even political moderates…any and all of those who were once comfortably on the inside looking out until November 9, 2016, never realizing that the day would come when they would have to fight all over again for basic things they’d come to take for granted--namely the fair and orderly functioning of their government and the sane and civil conduct of their society. With the election of Donald J. Trump as president, all that has been thrown into history’s dumpster. The thin veil of orderly government was shred entirely when the Republican majority bullied its way to holding up for almost a year a legitimate Obama nominee for the Supreme Court under blatantly false pretenses until they could ram through their own man. The rapidly deteriorating civility of our society collapsed definitively before our eyes on board a United Airlines flight out of Chicago when company thugs--not unlike those who beat up striking union workers in the 1930s--brutalized a paying customer; then a complicit media rushed in to pile on the victim with sordid details from his past. The nation has been building to this state of Manifest Insanity for years, but still those with any sense of patriotism and civic responsibility look on in horror.  
If you cannot see the connection between Trump’s ascendency and this final dissolution of our country, you are a person who is unbothered by his boast that women like to have him grab their pussies; his promise that he would release his tax returns if he ran for president; his lies about the size of his crowds, his standings in the polls, and myriad other petty matters; his 3 a.m. PRESIDENTIAL tweeting about TV ratings, celebrity behavior, and slights to his ego; his routine betrayals of his campaign promises; his outsourcing of foreign policy to his clothing designer daughter and her hedge fund manager husband; and his stunning, constant displays of ignorance…like recalling the cake he was eating when he told China’s president he was bombing a foreign country, but could not remember the name of the country. If this is you--unbothered, unfazed, unconcerned over the behavior of this very unstable, unfit man…you are that very person he had in mind when he claimed he could shoot someone on 5thAvenue and you’d remain loyal. You are a sucker and an enabler of the damage he’s doing on an almost hourly basis.  
If on the other (better) hand, you are aware of how dire our straits are, you best be in for the long, tough fight. Do not be sitting back wishing and hoping that someone is going to fight the fight for you (or, just as bad, giving purity tests to those who want to be your ally in the fight). Such entitled thinking is what got us into this mess. On April 15, I will be participating in my second protest march against Trump since he became president. If I was protesting his broken promise not to play golf because he would be too busy "making America great again", this would be my 17th march because that’s how many times he’s played golf rather than tending to "the mess" he maintains he inherited (Good, God, even if we get rid of him, cleaning up the bullshit he is leaving behind will take an EPA clean-up Superfund in the billions).
Protest marches are not the be-all and end-all of political action. I don’t think anyone who will be marching this weekend believes that taking to the streets will force Trump, at long last, to release his tax returns. All it can do is demonstrate that a mass of people does care about the issue so that politicians and the media do not let it go.  Of course, sometimes they hit the ignore button anyway, as they did during the grossly under-reported Iraq War protests at great human and financial cost to the nation. Sometimes they ignore the polls, the phone calls to Congress, the letters to the editors. It’s never been easier or more rewarding to ignore public opinion than it is now, as demonstrated by the heist of the Obama appointment to the Supreme Court in broad daylight. It can have the wearying, frustrating effect of making protestors feel like that bird in the video above…crashing our heads in a vain attempt to enter a room we may never know again.
But there’s another metaphor for the protestors, one apropos of the season and more uplifting. It’s the metaphor of the man who was as dead and buried as our democracy now seems, but on the third day he rolled away the rock to his tomb and re-ascended to the perch where he belonged.  We should make no mistake about it--resurrecting our country is going to take as much faith as hard work.     


H/T to Kim Casey for the link to the
ever-good John Fugelsang