News and fantasies
(Pandemic Diary - day 97)
From my journal: 3 June 2020 (Wednesday)
News
Derailed by the news, by the dark portent of our current situation, by this feeling that it won’t just fade away this time, that it might explode instead. Grappling with this feeling that I should do something to help.
But not knowing what that “something” is, and doubting that it even exists.
Yet I’m in thrall to the news, acutely addicted to it, to seeing what happens next, hoping it’s good, but also secretly a little bit thrilled by the idea that there’s going to be more to see, more outrage, more violence.
Fantasy (dark)
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some dark fantasies where that crowd that was routed for the church photo op charges the White House instead, where they break through and remove the scoundrel from his bunker.
Maybe they hang him. Maybe they drag him through the streets. Or maybe they just publicly humiliate him on camera. That’s the image that just came to me, footage of him cowering in a corner blubbering or crying or telling his bodyguards to attack. And they ignore him, they step aside and let the crowd have him.
Of course I don’t want that.
It’s only a fantasy, and regardless of how despicable he is, and how very much he might deserve that, much more harm than good would flow from it.
That’s what I keep telling myself: chaos and disorder are not the way forward, however appealing they might feel in a fantasy.
Fantasy (brighter)
At the same time, there seems to be something different about this moment, and it feels like it’s growing rather than fading.
There are other fantasy scenarios that aren’t dark, good fantasies where the crowds continue to grow, where the “disobedience” becomes more and more civil, where the numbers and the optics become more powerful than the corrupted forces arrayed in protection of the president.
If there were some clear and specific demands, and if one of those was the resignation of the president, and if the force of protest was large enough and widespread enough and had the fortitude to stay in place, it could (in this brighter fantasy) be that the regime could end, and our national nightmare with it.
Reality
Do I think anything like that will happen? Not at all. No, the much more likely thing is that this will fade away, just as it always does.
Because no matter how it “feels” in the moment, there’s not that much difference between this episode and the hundreds of other episodes that have already played themselves out.
There is deeper penetration with this one, more notice of it from people like me, but the sad truth of it is that, for people like me, there’s sympathy and perhaps in our better moments there’s empathy, but sympathy and empathy are not the same as understanding, and we have no skin in the game. Therefore it remains a game, an entertainment that we watch from the stands.
We may be cheering for the right team, and that team might have a truly righteous cause.
We may deeply want that team to win, and we may yell louder and cheer harder because we think that somehow that will help the players on the field. We may be truly happy when they do well and truly depressed when they don’t.
But no matter how much we identify with the team, even play the game vicariously through them, we aren’t on the team.
We’ll watch and cheer and wave our banners, feel those addictive surges of powerful emotion, but then, regardless of the results, we’ll go home to our sheltered lives, fundamentally the same as we were, untouched in any physical way by the game.