Just past 9AM, at this moment the tables are empty within Starbucks, except for myself.  Kevin, a contractor,  stands behind me adding sugar and creme to his tall cup of coffee.  Momentarily he will depart.  He always does.  I am  surprised that he appears to be working on a Sunday.

I read these lines in the NY Times Magazine, in an article entitled Dark Horse by Namwali Serpell.  The article addressed the relationship between social media and the final weeks of the HBO series Game of Thrones.  These lines in the next to last paragraph of the article stopped me cold.

….completion is to art
as death is to life:

You can see
what it all meant
only when it is over.

Incompleteness is
key….

These lines captured what my instinct has been telling me over and over the last few months.  It seems many things that heretofore we agreed upon have been turned upon their heads.  These things were seldom discussed because general agreement supported the various topics of discussion that did come to mind, and were discussed.

Freedom for example was recognized as a present experience that we aspire to explore, each in his or her own way, and that my life, your life is freedom’s discovery.  We “knew” that the meaning of freedom remained for each of us to give definition to, by our living.  Until recently little need be said about freedom.  Not any any longer.

In the America of today, many words are expended to show that freedom means my right to own any type and caliber of weapon, up to the limit of a full automatic buzz-saw machine gun.

And not to neglect the other side of the divide, there is much conversation about the freedom to be recognized as non-gendered, or “non-binary” as the correct term for the matter goes.  I think that I get it.  The friction of life comes at you, comes at me from all quarters.  Isn’t that’s how we know that we are alive?  Dealing with the friction is a necessary aspect of our life journey.   To be in discomfort means that one is alive.  If one chooses, as an assertion of freedom, to repudiate any reference to gender in the ongoing discourse with others— how is one to “kick-start” a conversation with others?   Seems like a linguistic cul-de-sac to me.

How did we lose our tether to the dynamic stories within which we discovered a ground to stand as Americans?  How did we so completely lose our bearings?

It seems to me that the story of Christianity, which is a variation of the Jewish faith is about liberation from oppression in it’s many forms.  The story suggests if we persevere, and take care of one another to the best of our ability we will be met with a power beyond ourselves that will see us through.  How could we forget about that?

How did we come to approve fencing out the hungry, the sick, the desperate and terrorized at our southern border, even separating them from their children?

Our President announced a postponement of a nationwide round up of families who have received an order of deportation that was to begin today.  It is a postponement only.  A cocked gun remauns held to the heads of many without any other place of safety to sustain their lives.

Finally, our president pointedly takes credit for saving over a hundred Iranian lives by postponing a military strike on their country in retaliation to their destruction of one of our surveillance drones.  He also announced that the economic screws would be substantially increased to force the Iranians to give him what he wants.  I have to ask,  what if they are not broken? If they prove unwilling to accede to his demand, —then what?

To my eye it looks as if we have played out the string, completed our story and now we must leave the stage.  There are no further moves to make, nowhere left to go.  The American tale is complete because we have insisted upon a sharp, clipped definition of the great themes that kept us alive by their indefinable dynamism within the open-ended story.  We insist upon sharp closure within our control, upon an unassailable security for our life—- and now we shall have it.

And now….

an older, creakier
interpretative machine
will make sense
of our opening and closing episodes.

Paid cultural gatekeepers
are already carving
the epitaphs.

—-Namwali Serpell