Saturday, January 28, 2017

Do I write about despair for America, or do I write about what I made for dinner? Do I write about my children who are thriving, or do I write about the children in Syria who are dying? Where does my everyday life intersect with the chaos and the cruelty being perpetrated in the name of our nation? Where does privacy end and the chasm of the future begin?

I have no answers to any of these questions. But I do know that I agree, word for word, with Philip Roth's excoriation:
I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English. (The New Yorker,  January 30, 2017)
We are living in a terrible time.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

Writing about what you had for dinner and your pride in your children are the very things that do unite us.
The despair is everywhere!!!

David X. Novak said...

Do not despair; act.

Dawn Potter said...

There's despair, and there's writing about despair, and the experiences are not always simultaneous. Personally, at this moment, I don't feel inner despair, but I do feel it all around me. And it may need to be chronicled.