“Life sucks,” said Lady, rather uncharacteristically, since
she normally is quite cheery. “Everything sucks after Donald Trump.”
“I know what you mean,” I told her. “I’ve decided, I can’t
do Facebook any more than once a day: otherwise, I’ll be in a total funk. And
that goes for the news, as well. But the big question is: what to do? Call my
representative? Jennifer González? Who has no vote? Am I deadened already? It’s
just two weeks now since the brute took office, and I’m feeling completely
beaten down.”
We move to the back of the gift shop, where there are sofas
and a half-moon stage.
“Can I tell Marc your story?” Lady asked a woman sitting
nearby; the woman didn’t respond.
“It’s OK,” I told her. “Everybody has the right to keep
their own story private….”
Lady tells me anyway: the woman’s children got taken away
from her.
“She’s a wonderful mom,” said Lady. “The kids are very
happy, you can tell.”
The lady begins to cry. A man comes in, and hugs her.
“Husband?” I whisper to Lady.
“Boyfriend,” she mouths back.
I go off in search of a paper towel.
When I come back, the boyfriend is explaining: this is why
he is not a Federalist.
Well, neither Lady nor I had much of an idea of what a
Federalist might be, but it soon became clear. The boyfriend, it turned out,
was against any government intervention, and was indignant that his home
state—Mississippi—had been forced to enact seatbelt legislation.
“We had to do it to get funding for the highways,” explained
the boyfriend.
“But that’s a good thing: seatbelts save lives,” said Lady.
“Well, if you want to be a damned fool, you should have the
right to be,” said the boyfriend. And then he went on to tell us more of his
philosophy. In fact, it soon became apparent: the philosophy was vastly more
interesting than the woman’s children.
That’s when I got up to leave….
“She lives in the projects,” Lady told me later. “So she’s
in the system….”
Lady clearly has absorbed a bit of anti-Federalism. Or maybe
not…who am I to say.
“Anyway, some of her neighbors got pissed that she was going
to move with the boyfriend to Mississippi, so they told the Family Department
that she was neglecting her children. So they set up a sting, luring her to a
local park, and then taking the children…..”
She says it matter-of-factly, as if children being taken
from a mother were a normal thing.
I ponder it all: the woman who is weeping in the back of a
gift shop, the children who are who-knows-where, the boyfriend who values his
philosophy seemingly more than his girlfriend’s children. Does any of this make
sense? Are we at the point where children can be ripped from a mother’s grasp?
There’s nothing to be done, it seems, about the woman’s
children, since she has now left, and her boyfriend as well (though apparently
separately). But then I violate my oath, and turn guiltily to Facebook. And
that’s when I learn that prayers are being sought for the pregnant wife of an
elder at the Third Presbyterian Church in Staunton. This because an old friend
is either the minister or in some way connected to the church.
I wrote to my friend and asked: what about a lawyer? (As an
atheist, I’m a little weak in the prayer department….) And that’s when I learn
that they’re working on it, but it’s a rather specialized field, and the
hearing will be in Alexandria.
Somehow, it all seems to make sense, I think, since the
point of it all is that nothing makes sense.
And the other point?
We’ve stopped reacting, and that’s what they want. The
government takes children away from a mother? The government bans a pregnant
woman from entering the country? Even after the most rigorous vetting process
in the world? Even after they take fingerprints and DNA samples? Even after the
UN, for good sakes, does the initial interview?
“Non sum qualis eram,”
I told Lady, and she completed the line: “bonae
sub Regno Cynarae.”
We are not as we were under the realm of the good Cynara.
Yes, I thought. Cynara took a good look around her, and then
took off? Who can blame her? Wouldn’t I, or perhaps even you, do the same? Yes,
Cynara took off, leaving only the merest hint of her Alexandrine verse behind
her, and who knows Dowson anymore? It will soon be, I tell myself, all quite
normal: people will start to disappear, the news will turn astonishingly and
consistently glorious about the Trump administration, and how happy we’ll all
be, when the EPA is gutted and corporations become not just citizens but privileged
citizens, or super citizens! Yes, yes—we’ll be smiling as we get down, five
times a day, to pray toward Washington, home of our spiritual and political
leader, Donald J. Trump.
Odd—the first thing I think of when I wake in the morning is
that Trump is president.
Odd—I no longer remember Cynara’s face…..
