Most days I post. Should be all days. This goes toward making up for any days missed.
1.
Yesterday I spoke with a friend who could not hear what I was saying.
Depressed and trapped in his own endless night, nothing reached him. Overwhelmed by current sadness and old anger (or old sadness and current anger) there was not much I could do but listen to him and invite him to take a walk, to be together.
Few things are worse than when you know doing a dish in the sink would make you feel better and yet you cannot imagine how to do that dish. For now, unable to function, that’s where my friend is.
This unfortunate anecdote might lead to any number of subjects. The difference, for instance, between a friend/coach (how I posture myself) and a trained therapist. Or how, when even baby steps forward are impossible, maybe the best thing you can do is just help someone slow their downward cycle.
But another subject is to consider the cultural equivalent of my friend’s despair.
If a failed state, like Sri Lanka today or Europe in 1945, is the equivalent of a near-fatal car accident, what is a depressed state, not in economic terms but in spiritual and psychological ones?
Would such a state be self-medicating? Sleeping badly? Ranting one moment and crying the next? As my friend is? Would it be deaf to practical advice? Intent on distraction? Obsessed with itself but not able to check the mirror of self-reflection?
And what do you do then? When you are talking society not individual?
How can you just “be” for a culture gone to pieces?
How do you hold the hand of America now?
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2.
Let’s imagine a game of the kind we have seen many times. You turn on the ‘ole T.V. and it is the ninth inning of the ball game. Look, the Red Sox have 2 runs and, what’s that? The Yankees have how many runs? 1,000?
Or it is March Madness and UNC is beating Duke 27,000 to 29.
Or some Sunday the Washington Football team scores two touchdowns and kicks a field goal but looses to the Cowboys by fifteen thousand points.
None of these contests are as lopsided as America vs. Japan in terms of yearly gun deaths.
There, adjusted for population, the score is 30 to 45,000.
And yet after this debacle the coach of Team America comes out of the locker room, stands in front of the microphones to say with bravado: “Well, we’ve got this bear arms strategy we believe is a real winner.”