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| Someone to walk with... |
Except for a letter or two, I haven’t been writing. More astonishingly, I’ve hardly been reading.
Still having coffee every morning, getting outdoors with my dog, going to my bookshop four days a week (Wednesday through Saturday) for four hours a day, then back home and outside with the dog again before supper, but it’s been different for the past week because, in addition to Sunny Juliet, I have had a constant human companion. I have slept better and have awakened happy, despite continuing corruption and chaos abroad in the land.
Oh, my country! Cry, the beloved country!
I need to read Alan Paton’s novel again, set in the era of racial tension that directly preceded the 1948 election of the National Party government. The party's appeal to white fear and white supremacy, as well as strong anti-British sentiment (subsequent to the Boer War) and promises to improve the economy for farmers and (white) laborers, put them in power and inaugurated apartheid in South Africa. Their rule lasted for 46 years, with apartheid the law of the land.
Paton’s book, because a novel, focuses on individuals affected by conditions in their country rather than the more abstract march of history, and I have been thinking of how easy it can be to ignore issues not part of our immediate daily lives, events that do not touch us personally. Almost every life is touched by tragedy sooner or later. But it is the specific nature of the tragedy touching any particular person that usually dictates the cause or causes that that person finds urgent, while other people’s tragedies and other people’s causes never feel as desperately compelling.
Thus it is that the large group of people who care deeply about something, whether mental illness or abused children or cancer research or autism treatment or whatever (and a majority of people in any country, I feel sure, care about at least one issue and usually more than one) can accuse one another, because their cares and concerns are different, of not caring.
For instance, ICE raids continue in Minneapolis and elsewhere, abducting first and asking questions later, with families and whole communities living in emotionally crippling anxiety day after day. Although we haven’t heard as much about it in the past week, because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone in the streets in the past week, a family member in the Twin Cities tells me nothing is better there and that the daily stress and anxiety continue, along with volunteer operations to help the terrified.
But if no one in your family or group of friends has dark skin or was born in another country or is of a “nonconforming” gender or practices a faith tradition outside of Christianity, perhaps you don't consider the current administration dangerous. And so it is with every heartbreaking issue. As for immigration raids far, far from the border, even when American citizens are picked up and held without being charged, perhaps it's still easy to look away and say that, well, of course a few mistakes will be made, but ICE troopers, after all, are “just doing their job.” It shouldn’t be easy to look away and dismiss concerns, I keep thinking. If you’re at all concerned about legal vs. illegal (as ICE supporters insist they are), then you ought to care, I fervently believe, for little aspects of American law such as probable cause and due process. But maybe some people haven’t followed those events too closely, because other issues that do touch their own personal lives take all their attention. Or because they don't want to know?
Can people be persuaded to care? How?
My life has been more peaceful during the last two weeks, not because various horrible conflict situations in our country have been resolved or even improved but because I have stopped trying to make people care who have not yet seen the horror. I have not given up all hope that their eyes will eventually be opened—if only when they are personally touched, at last, by some aspect of it—but I have given up the hope that any information and opinions I might share will make a difference to them. When their eyes are opened, they will see, and not before, and when they see, good people will care.
There are always, of course, a minority of people (I feel certain they are the minority of human beings on earth) who care only for themselves and whose “care” for themselves is so fixed on money and what it can buy that they are willing to sell their very souls to see their worldly wealth increase, and unfortunately, those presently in power in Washington seem to belong to that don’t-care-for-others group, their greed and aggressive natures giving them outsized visibility on the national and world scene. —Perhaps you say not all in that highly visible cabal are motivated by money? Some are afraid! Ah, but what do they fear? Losing their jobs? Doesn’t that come down to sacrificing integrity in order to hold onto wealth and position?
Read my friend Dawn’s pithy summary of the Gordie Howe Bridge brouhaha, written before the news came out that it isn’t about “Canada” or “respect” or “fairness” at all but—surprise!—the old billionaire club protecting one another’s interests, and to hell with American (and Canadian) workers! Grift and corruption, old political allies.
Another current issue, one bound to affect generations of Americans yet unborn (think about it, you who advocate tirelessly for the “unborn,” with nary a thought for living children and their families), is the threat to the “endangerment finding.” (Update: More than a threat.) The name alone may not tell you much, but the endangerment finding has to do with environmental pollution and public harm. In 2007 SCOTUS recognized the responsibility of the EPA to limit greenhouse gases, citing public harm. Now in February 2026, the current administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, a 46-year-old Republican from New York State and father of two, appointed in January of 2025 by then-incoming president DJT, is poised to stop protecting the American public. Pollute, baby, pollute! Your investment portfolio will love it!
(But of course! In department after department of the federal government, the current administration’s strategy has been to find someone not to direct valuable operations but to gut said department of its budget, expertise, and the ability to fulfill its mission, with the overall goal of eliminating government services and turning them all over to the highest bidder, i.e., to those who can guarantee squeezing the last dollar out of the American public for private profit.)
Threats to free elections? Don't even get me started. Anyone who isn't concerned is just not paying attention.
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| Midday Thursday, Northport |
So I come back to Alan Paton’s novel, which begins with a contrast between green, grassy land and overgrazed bare earth, a contrast of human wealth and poverty mirrored by the land itself, and I think of aquifers in North America depleted by CAFOs, wells polluted by mining and other industry, water made undrinkable and air made unbreathable by industrial and automotive effluents and emissions. I think also of the deepened and still deepening divisions in this country of ours, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, racial divides that I had hoped were healing back when President Obama was elected, splits political, dogmatic, religious, and also (because the issues have to do with our most dearly held values) deeply personal, such that it seems the legacy of the current administration will, for the remainder of my life, be a tragically divided national landscape.
“Cry, the beloved country,” wrote Alan Paton of South Africa in 1948, a country he loved deeply and gave generously of himself to try to heal.
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, not stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, not give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.
- - Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
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Will the legacy of our time on earth be a Divided, Poisoned, Polluted and Hate-Filled States of America? Will those of us who have loved our country “too deeply” have our hearts broken over and over before we die? And if that happens, if we do not live to see our country turn back from fascism and oligarchy, will a future generation yet be able to regain the betrayed ideals our parents lived by and some died for? Will American children not yet born have another chance to find healing and to make of this country a shining city on a hill? Or will America go the way of so many former empires, a story of the dead past for history books written and read in a few surviving free nations?
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| My father, WWII |
