Look Away

Welp.

No one was more surprised than me when Kamala Harris and then Joe Biden both successfully took their oaths of office on the steps of the Capitol this past Wednesday without incident. Nobody tried to storm the building (again) or kidnap one or both or fly an exploding blimp into the event in order to kick off the long-prophesied race war in America or for any other reason.

To be fair, I guess there was one group more surprised than me. But then if you have overlaid all of your perception and understanding with a filter than inserts a narrative about lizard people, satanists, pedophiles and cannibals all conveniently in the form of the people you mildly disagree with about, like, tax policy, you're setting yourself up for a lot of surprises any time you run up against a wall of unbendable objective reality. I guess it's possible to convince yourself that this is an ultimate case of luring the enemy into a false sense of security by allowing yourself to be completely defeated and publicly discredited, in which case: full marks for thoroughness. The comprehensive humiliation is an especially convincing touch.

A lot of commentary has devoted itself to the fact that the inauguration dais was built over the same steps that had been stormed by traitors attempting an anti-Constitutional coup, but for some reason as I watched the events (in pieces. I was working from home), the riot of two weeks ago seemed like fifty years and a thousand miles away.* I know intellectually it was an artificial calm borne out of a terrifyingly complete police-and-military security presence and a strategic depopluation of the area seeing as there's a plague on and all, but when the president-elect arrived and turned to climb the Capitol steps before the ceremony and the Soldiers forming the parallel lines of an honor cordon turned to salute, my breath caught in my throat and I wept a bit, for not the last time. The kids were off living their lives (two living on their own and the third off at his mother's still serving a cautionary possible-exposure COVID quarantine I'm happy to say come to nothing), so I was free to have a giggling, sniffy morning moved by pageantry and relief.

I'm not a patriotic person. Or rather I am, but not in any of the ways that ingratiate you to the rest of the crowd at a monster truck rally. Nothing makes me hunch my shoulders and keep my head on a swivel more than flag-waving and a fucking Lee Greenwood song.** I prefer a patriotism more rooted in ideological integrity whereby the actions of a society match their stated values. But that's the kind of approach likely to get you yelled at in a Wal-Mart parking lot. And you tend not to get invited back to next year's Fourth of July party.

Mostly what I want from my country is reassurance. I don't need it to make me feel better about myself and certainly not any better than anyone else. There aren't really that many things we ask the federal government to do, but the reason the last four years have been so fucking stressful is that the only constant has been its retreat from literally all of those sectors. There are good reasons to cry at the induction of the first woman in the executive-branch dyad, and the first woman of color to boot (and from my dang home state, that's just piling on). Or in the ascension of an open-hearted, if slightly daft, empath and stutterer (when one of your own kids is a stutterer as well) after the four-year-long siren-scream of an emotional paraplegic trapped and unmoveable in the middle of everyone's living room.

But in the moment as it is, the prospect of competence is enough to move. The bar is embarrassingly low, but just the idea that the federal government gives a shit if any of us live or die releases pent-up waves and waves of relief, if only because we hadn't realized how many blows we'd had to clench ourselves up for, with every variable (number, duration, frequency, ferocity) we were not allowed to know.

The best thing I can imagine today is a government I don't have to think about literally every day. It's not a particularly inspiring civics lesson, but sometimes reality is entirely subjective. Some of us see lizard-satanist-pedophiles. Others of us just let ourselves be awash in bliss at the tantalizing, luxurious prospect of remembering how to be disinterested again.

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*technically I guess I was three-thousand miles away, so that kind of fucks with my metaphor, sorry.

**no links here to clarify. If you don't know what I'm referring to, revel in your ignorance. You're living a better life than I.

how much did I cry?