I have no words. Or too many words crowding to get out all together and all at once. So I have to take a step back and think about the individual words and how they connect together to put forth ideas.
I am watching The West Wing. Again. Since signing in to HBO Max, I am on my third or fourth pass at the show. I watch The West Wing because I desperately miss Joe. I miss not being able to talk with him, not being able to hear his voice. I don’t even remember the sound of Joe’s voice anymore. I don’t think I could remember his voice moments after he died. I can see his face in front of me like I am looking through glass to everything outside. Joe’s face is the shear curtain through which I take in the rest of the world. And it is the prism through which I watch The West Wing for the umpteenth time.
I watch. I remember. And I cry.
And I wonder how in the heck did I make it through to today [05.19.23]. But truly, I barely made it through. At the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, as soon as Johns Hopkins put up their database, I checked the numbers every day. I even made an Excel spreadsheet with answers to questions that I wasn’t hearing anyone ask. How did our numbers, U.S. numbers compare to other countries per capita. Because we’re like 50 countries all rolled into one. So our numbers can’t stand alone or in a vacuum. I watched the numbers every day. For a few weeks at the beginning, I watched the numbers. I can remember when we went from 70-some thousand to 80, to 90. I remember watching as we went from fourth or fifth to third to second to first. I clearly remember when is was all supposed to go away. When it all was supposed to end. No cases. None. Zero. No new cases. No old cases. No deaths.
But is’t what Jon Stewart once said: [I am paraphrasing] why aren’t we out there yelling and screaming? [there were some protests or other – or people being loud and acting stupid] How come the moderates are in the streets making their voices heard, making their stand. And then he said: … [the way he hesitates] ’cause … we are moderate.
It’s like when I was teaching. Invariably there would be a lesson, a discussion, a current event that would open a conversation with my students. There were times when in my head I was screaming, “how could you think that?” But I would hold my tongue. I would keep myself from saying what was screaming to get out. I remember my students arguing over whether I was a Democrat or a Republican. Not yet being a citizen, I would reassure them that I was neither because I had not yet earned the right to vote, and so I had not earned the right to align myself politically. Not that I would have admitted any political affiliation to my students. *While I came to understand that I was not a very good teacher, I kept true to a belief that I keep neutral — that my role in the classroom was to guide my students to process rather than to product — that it was much more important to ask the questions that would lead them to discover, to articulate, and to define their beliefs, no matter if I agreed with them.* Where I always had difficulty and where I lose my words and my mind is when I come up against dogma.
I don’t have a cohesive idea of what I am writing about here. As I write, I am watching The West Wing through my left peripheral. Even more odd is that I am listening to the words through headphones. I am listening to the “Dead Irish Writers” episode — the one with Abby Bartlet’s birthday party, Lord John Marbury, where one political landmine is the visit to the White House of an IRA fighter, and another is funding for the “super-conducting super collider.” Oh, and Donna Moss is temporarily not a U.S. citizen. So this is playing in my ears as I pull words together and write this.
And today, I read and edit, and I am an American Citizen.