I’ve woken up in a new world. Not a brave one; one created by insecure people afraid of a future they’re unable to understand. The view of this new world from Humptulips County is mixed – mostly bad, but with just enough dash of good in the mixture to allow me hesitant optimism.
Since I think visually, I have to explain my reaction in pictures.
The first and most immediate is of the state of being two weeks before a high school senior prom for which the biggest of the school bullies has managed, through intimidation and determination, to be elected King of the Prom. Me? I am a nerd without a date for the prom, afraid to ask anyone and justifying my failure by noting that it is unclear how the prom will turn out given such an inauspicious beginning. The prom might turn out to be a lark, but this is highly unlikely given that all of the ingredients for disaster are in place.
But as true to life as this image may be, it is unhelpful. While in my daydream I can avoid the hypothetical prom by giving into my fears of rejection with the use of a facially rational excuse, I have no means to avoid the next four years in America except by means I do not care to contemplate, much less consider, for as much as a nanosecond.
My second daydream is that I have magically become a resident of some European colony of the 1950s in the heart of a continent deemed backward and downtrodden by its colonial occupiers. I am trapped in European skin, but don’t buy into the prevailing beliefs of the colonial culture. My fellow Europeans, convinced of their own enlightenment and of their superiority over the natives they supplanted and cowed by the force of arms, are secure in their dominance – unaware that trying to hold the inevitable at bay by force is a short-term strategy guaranteed to implode in some not-so-distant future; unaware of the irony that prevails in thinking themselves dominant in a land and climate for which their culture and ways are ill-suited. Their refusal to see the inevitability of impending change is dense and deliberate. Not only are their heads in the sand up to and including their collar bones, their collective asses are waving in the air in invitation of illicit and painful usage. And I, who looks but does not think like them, am without a passport and must make my way to safety by thought rather than action, even though the odds are heavily against my success.
But wait! This isn’t a daydream at all. It is a nightmare – a nightmare that has returned, and will return, generation after generation because humans, regardless of color or culture, never seem to learn the lessons of experience. I toss and turn looking for a dreamscape exit, hoping at some visceral level of incomprehension that I will wake up and consign the nightmare to my subconscious for a few hours or days of relief. But I am not allowed any respite from this nightmare, no matter how temporary.
I am not even allowed to tell my friends and neighbors about the night’s absurdities: far too many of them will not view it as a nightmare but as a welcome return to an imagined, fifty year old cultural norm stripped of its ills and illnesses by their fevered longing for the happier times of childhood when all responsibility was someone else’s obligation, and those possessed of a bullying nature will see it as a wet dream of opportunity. And I cannot tell one from another; cannot identify who I might reason with.
This isn’t a nightmare after all. It’s the new reality. The meek new world.
The dash of good? I live in Humptulips County, a place where billionaires cannot buy judges with their money no matter how much of it they spend, a place where my friend, an openly gay Hispanic/Asian/American woman, can be elected by statewide vote to our Supreme Court because of her energy, wits, humor, practicality, and intelligence, a place that is truly a melting pot of flavors and cultures from which I am privileged to partake, a place that is a stew of humanity as interesting, as flavorful, and as subtle as a fine red wine partaken at its peak. A place whose watchword is hope.
I already live in the future that others dread. I thank God for the mercy that it is beyond my comprehension to understand why they fear it.
