The Storm That’s Coming

When I sat down to write this post, I really didn’t know what to say. I just returned to New Jersey after a two week stay in Moss Point helping my mom recover. We locked eyes at around 4:30am as I was leaving to drive to the airport, both of us fighting back tears. We talked in incomplete sentences about the road ahead. She begins her radiation treatments soon.

Sadness traveled with me. I am a bit overwhelmed. I looked at my phone around 6:07am, and there was a recorded message from Bishop William Barber. He prayed for my mom and reminded me of the power of faith. I smiled and forwarded the message to her.

The sadness lingered.

On July 4^th, Donald Trump signed into law the so-called “big- beautiful bill” and the Guadalupe River suddenly swelled with anger and swallowed up at least 70 people, including 21 children, in Texas. Communities grieve. Public officials offer prayers. Babies are gone.

Politicians wrangle over whether the staffing shortages at NOAA were, in part, responsible. I am not interested in the political theater. Instead, the moral concern presses in. I keep thinking about the senseless loss of life and the abdication of governmental responsibility for the lives of Americans.

The flash floods in Texas happened as the Republicans and Donald Trump decided to shred the social contract to line the pockets of billionaires. They opted, in effect, to defund government. Millions will lose healthcare coverage. Children will not eat. Hospitals in rural areas will likely shutter their doors. Universities and colleges that have large numbers of Pell Grant eligible students will struggle to make up budgetary shortfalls. Some will close. And I could go on and on.

I keep thinking about what will happen to poor, rural communities. What will happen to a state like Mississippi? And for what? And how will the country survive it all? Or will it?

I could reach for objective factors to account for the political and social collapse, but that seems too sterile, too detached. A line from Lionel Trilling comes to mind: that “the barometer of social breakdown is not suffering through economic deprivation but always moral degeneration through moral choice.”

People are choosing to be cruel, embracing policies that will harm others and themselves. Like a gaggle of dodo birds, they are running mindlessly towards the cliff, because they would rather destroy this country than to confront themselves and their choices.

The sadness lingers.

The French writer who gave us the best description of American democracy also noted the ominous clouds that covered this fragile experiment. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:

Among democratic nations, men easily attain a certain quality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire. …At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die.

That is the reason for the strange melancholy that haunts inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of abundance.

The power of envy and the relentless pursuit of money have their distorting and disfiguring effects. To be sure, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.”

But the strange melancholy that has hold of this place cuts a bit deeper. Its fount is the split that rests at the heart of the nation’s self-conception: that the ideal of American life runs up against its persistent denial. That Americans are not who they say they are, and they engage in a manic effort to hide that fact from view.

Melancholy tinges the madness, producing people who delight in pulling off the wings of butterflies and who eventually turn on themselves.

Anyway…the sadness lingers. Bracing myself for the storms that will keep coming. And praying that my mama beats this cancer.

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