Slouching Beasts

Admittedly, I have had a hard time since Tuesday’s election. I’ve moved from shock to rage to fear and back again. A dizzying array of emotions seasoned with bitterness.  

The idea that the country has decided to give Donald Trump another go – even with all the evidence in hand – leaves me with the feeling that, whatever the politics, a majority of Americans have lost their minds. I keep asking myself, in the words of Stamp Paid, a character from Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, “what are these people?” And what have they done?

I know that I have to pick myself up eventually. Brooding and lament aren’t enough.  Trump is the president-elect, and we must fight, no matter the violent joy of the other side, for the world we want. Ours must be an ongoing refusal to assent to what these people are about to do. And we will have to risk everything if we are to survive this mess and make it to the other side.  

But I cannot help it. I am caught up in my feelings. And I need to sit for a minute. Gather myself and think about the difficult days ahead. Read a novel. Find a poem.  I reach for William Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats began writing this poem in January 1919.  The world seemed to be coming apart with World War I, the Russian Revolution, the red summer in the United States, and the political turmoil in Ireland.  People seemed unmoored as greed and selfishness eroded any robust sense of connection and community.  “The centre cannot hold,” Yeats declared, and “innocence is drowned.”  

The rhyming of history. Our world seems to be coming apart at the seams.  Gaza, Ukraine, billionaires run amok, and the country soaks in hatred and grievance. We have no sense of moral obligation to one another.  Self-interested. Lonely.  Despairing.  American innocence drowned.

And the “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem?  To my mind, especially now, that beast has shadowed this country since its inception.  In 1852, Frederick Douglass referred to it as the monster coiled up in the bosom of the nation.  He even called them “wild beasts” who hunted fugitive men, women, and children.  

We have lived with those beasts for generations. Watched their movements.  Lost people we love to their rages and now we barrel towards a world where they are free to roam and hate once again.  The trouble we face goes beyond Donald Trump.  He is just the latest manifestation of the rot that sits at the heart of America, U.S.A.  The trouble is in us.  Or them—the giant serpent in the garden.

We face a social disaster and political chaos as the country gives the reins of power over to Donald Trump and the white nationalists who support him. The “darkness drops again.” 

We must ensure that our babies survive and make it to the other side.  Love them and each other hard and at once as we gather ourselves to fight the battles to come. 

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