These days, I’m not at all thrilled about getting up in the morning.
As a rule, mornings are great times for me. The day is young and full of promise and opportunity. I leave the blinds open so that the sun wakes me up. I love the birds, calling and chirping, yelling and squawking, making sure the world knows they’re alive and this branch, this corner of the roof is Mine, Mine, Mine.
I suppose that makes me an optimist, which is good considering I’ve striven all my life to be one. It was a reaction to my very depressed Daddy-o, who could always find the dark lining in any silver cloud. Had I magical powers, I would have instantly snapped my fingers or twitched my nose to transform him into someone who, at the very least, had a nodding acquaintance with hope.
Too, I was afraid that Dad’s blues might have been congenital, that within me there existed his certainty that all was for shit. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I never had kids, that fear that some melancholy, hidden away deep within me, would be imposed upon my heirs, just the way Dad’s was on me.
In case that was true, I was going to fight the good fight against it. As Shakespeare or the Bible advised, He who would be calm must appear calm. Or, as the 1980s saying went, If you can’t make it, fake it. Even If I had been born with the depression gene, I’d successfully conquer it through will and practice. So there, you old glum DNA strands. See, Dad? There can be hope.
Or, maybe I was just a happy-go-lucky kid and it all came natural to me. No matter. I am what I am.
Aspiring. Looking for joy. Hoping for the best. Wishing and anticipating.
Except it’s really hard to do that these days.
My terribly imperfect country has been transformed the last few months. All the good America had mustered — achieved through tooth and nail battle over the decades and centuries — seems to be slipping away. Li’l Duce‘s pitched fight against education, science, curiosity, art, whimsy, tolerance, diversity, equity, inclusion, altruism, charity, generosity, and even the ancient qualities of agape and philia and his successful eradication of those things on a federal level has made this a mean, loathsome country.
For all our sins — and there’ve been plenty since the United States came into being 250 years ago — we Americans have always held out hope that the All Men Are Created Equal slogan might one day come to fruition, that when all was said and done, we’d turn out to be an okay bunch. Or, as the great Molly Ivins wrote, It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
We might not have arrived there at any time in our history but we were en route. Or so we told ourselves.
The rest of the world, largely, saw us that way too. Even though America’s mortal sins included the Native American holocaust, slavery, Jim Crow, environmental rape, institutionalized racism, and the capability to create the most fearsome bombs ever imagined, foreigners saw all those as anomalies, treatable cancers.
Those Americans, the world told itself, they’re not such a bad gang, warts and all.
But it’s expensive to care for others. It takes time to learn. It’s hard work trying to discover things. It demands patience to be able to accept those who look different, who act different, who eat different, who love different. Somehow, over the objections of those who fretted over their cost or supposed dangers, we set up agencies and offices — the EPA, the EEOC, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, Title IX, consumer protection agencies, the NEA, the NEH, the CPB, and all the rest — institutions that codified and ensured our commitment to all those things good and humane.
As one of my idols, Mike Royko, wrote: It’s much harder to be a liberal than a conservative. Why? Because it is easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand. Nevertheless, for the last 90 or so years, we’ve moved inexorably closer to a caring, good society. We were en route even if the destination seemed a thousand miles away.
Somehow, some way, a single man, a cult leader, has worked feverishly and successfully to dismantle as much of that infrastructure as possible. It’s easier, this man told his followers, to give them the finger.
And now it’s hitting home. With Congress’s cutoff of previously promised funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WFHB, home of my program Big Talk, finds itself in a financial crunch. Some 25 percent of our annual budget has gone poof. Now comes word that two key employees, Noelle Herhusky-Schneider, the assistant news director, and Josh Brewer, the operations manager, have been laid off. A damned shame for them. And everybody else who evaded the hangman will have all their responsibilities dumped on them.
Since January 20th — well, since the November election, really — it’s been getting harder and harder to face each day with any sense of optimism for America. Now it’s nearly impossible.
I’m not the only one unhappy about it all.
The sick thing is our unhappiness makes Li’l Duce and MAGA happy. Well, as happy as hateful, vengeful, scared people can be.