THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW

Thoughts from the Morning After

A FEW MONTHS AGO, MY PARTNER MAX AND I MOVED into our first house. It is a moderately sized white house in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, UT, complete with a wrap around porch and off-white picket fence. It is the kind of home a Harriet Nelson or June Cleaver or any mid-century sitcom wife would be proud of. The view from the kitchen window looks southwest onto, at first, a few houses of varying colors on either side of our street. The neighborhood, still in the process of fully being built up, ends abruptly just a short distance further, making the whole view look in some ways like a Hollywood film set. That sharp cutoff which separates our row of houses to the yet to be built ones opens up, like a cinematic backdrop, onto a western meadow of tumbleweeds and various other shrubbery. On a recent jog along this boundary line, I ran into an adolescent coyote and a group of three or four antelope which might as well be, for my east coast sensibility, running into extra-terrestrials on Mars. Further beyond that open meadow, the Oquirr Mountain range jets upward with its orderly cascade of tall green trees and snow-capped peaks. The view in its entirety summarizes much of what I have experienced for the past year living in Utah; the configuration of new man-made infrastructure and the violent beauty of the natural world.

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Early this morning after I learned about the news, I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. The only light making its way through the kitchen window at four in the morning came from my neighbors across the street who had emblazoned their house in red, white, and blue in apparent celebration of the news. Their enthusiasm for this possible outcome had been well known, with two yard signs staked confidently outside their picket fence. For months, the view of those signs outside my window were ever-present, a kind of looming prophecy catching my eye while making meals and entertaining friends. Now, the flashing streaks of patriotic colors blinked across the kitchen island, making me feel as though the news had manifested itself outside of my own head and into my house. Something was now tangible about what had occurred overnight. This was no nightmare. This was the beginning of something very real.

There have been several moments this morning when the mind suddenly spirals, the vision blurs, and the ears tune out. The bigness of it all—what this means for the country, what this means for the world—washes over all the senses randomly and without warning. The daily routine of doing dishes and making coffee and writing this essay has been interrupted by endless thoughts of falling political dominoes. The air conditioning is louder than ever and the sun coming through the window feels rude and unwelcomed.

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My cat seems undisturbed by the news. While slumping over the kitchen table drinking coffee this morning, the cat walked by with a swagger and confidence I cannot muster on my best days. His daily routine, which is minutely scheduled in his mind, has continued on just fine this morning. He asked for his food at five, sat in his chair at seven, and at nine wanted the window opened. The cat now sits on the window sill flanked by those two signs about making America great. It is a fascinating thing to observe. His world is profoundly unchanged as mine as sunk into one of endless over thinking. I think this counterpoint will, for the meantime, bring about some sanity to this house.

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My near constant companion for the past nine years has been a well thumbed copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Ever since I experienced that parallel morning of sobering news back in 2016, I have turned to Whitman’s declarative, cocky, and inspired poems with the reverence of a secular Bible. Whitman, observing an America falling deeper and deeper into despair and cynicism and polarization before the outbreak of the Civil War, wrote about the common threads of humanity that link citizens of the world together. The text functions as an empathetic road map, providing the way in which one can see the humanity in others. The man who will become the 47th president of the United States seems to reject that very notion outright. His is a view of us versus them. Without that world view, he doesn’t have much of a movement. And I would assume the same to be true about a majority of my fellow citizens and the residents of the house outside my kitchen window. But it has been a great task over the past nine years, a hard and conscious task, to see the shared humanity in my fellow citizens. In his expansive poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, Whitman embraces a type of empathy that reaches beyond the present and into the distant past and future. “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.” He asks, after displaying all we have in common, all the experiences we share, “What is it then between us?”

What is it between us? I cannot convince myself that my fellow citizens are the enemy. Maybe just for my own well being, but I cannot believe that the men and women I pass by everyday are energized and enthusiastic about what is to come, even if they enthusiastically voted for it. I cannot believe that they really approve of all the bile that has been spewed against their fellow citizens. I have to tell myself that this new majority does not know what they have done.

But they cannot become the enemy. And it would be very easy to do so. The last nine years have been ones of seemingly endless cruelty for the sake of it. This new majority which has ushered in this new era has excused it and amplified it and has, beyond my comprehension, added new members to their ranks. But we, the new minority in this country, must not see our fellow citizens has symbols of something larger than themselves. That mindset, that people are not flesh and blood but are rather representations of larger societal problems, is what lies at the core of violent radicalism. I cannot look out of that kitchen window and see “the other” as they might very well see me.

I love the promise of this country with a passion that surpasses any fear of being seen by my fellow citizens as naïve or cringey or anything else. My love of this country is built on the movers and shakers who have molded this deeply dysfunctional experiment into something aspirational and democratic. That my fellow citizens have welcomed something so objectively anti-democratic with open arms leaves me with the sinking feeling that I do not know my country anymore. There have always been two views of America and that this one, at long last, has proven itself to be hugely popular is deeply unsettling. I know that this current movement is wrong, and that simplistic assertion has gotten me through the past nine years and will hopefully get me through the next four and whatever is to come.

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A rule has been established for the remainder of the day: do not read or even glance at any “takes” online. They will be exhausting and contradictory. But I quickly broke the rule and flipped on NPR. A man from northern Michigan called in, voice breaking, worrying about what will happen to his gay son. A woman in Pennsylvania, aurally bewildered, said she was “scared to death.”

What is to come is uncertain and since I’m not in the prediction business—nor are the people who claim to be in such a business—we will simply have to take Mr. Trump’s plans seriously, and at the same time, hope against hope that he is, as he so often is, completely full of shit.