What if you don’t know you are a disaster?
I thought of this twice this morning.
The first time occurred while writing my weekly newsletter. I mentioned that reading “Weather” by Jenny Offill has made me realize that I have a disaster going on that I’m not fully aware of and I don’t mean Trump. I’m fully aware of that human disaster and we’re all experiencing that whether we recognize it or not. I mean a personal disaster.
How do I know? For the past two or three years, Facebook and Google ask me routinely if I’d like to rediscover this exact day from my posts of a year ago, five years ago? My response? Abject forlornness. I mean 100% descent to the underworld.
I likened it in my newsletter to being asked if I’d like to look back and savor the day I had lost my leg. I have fortunately never lost a leg but you get the idea. And, I had no idea why my response was so immediate and repeatable no matter one year or five years until I read a line in “Weather” a new novel by Jenny Offill.
She observed simply:” In those disaster movies, if a person sees something from the time before, a phone charger, say, or the Statue of Liberty, she starts to weep.”
So, my disaster is the inability to rediscover that time? Or, is it that the surface of my disaster and I have to dig deeper? That’s on my to-do list for this week. Figure out my true disaster.
Here’s the second time this morning that I thought about disasters. When a Sanders person wrote it was “disgusting” that Buttigieg and Klobuchar backed Biden last night. Disgusting. I understand you like your candidate. But, people can’t disagree with you? Don’t we have enough of that right now? Besides, this is losing playbook I saw unfold in 2016.
Sanders voters did not listen to their candidate when he conceded the nomination and asked his followers to vote for Clinton. They just couldn’t do it they said, “on principle”. Hilary was after all in their minds a liar. Well, look what kind of a liar we have now?
I’m voting for the candidate who has the math of needed delegates if not my personal stamp of approval. If Dems can’t manage to come together to vote for the nominee, whatever their last name, then their “principles” become our continued disaster and that is not disgusting but “tragic”.
We know better. Why can’t we do better?
