Later, Comma

The desires and hopes of the country’s inhabitants, the voters and people who never voted, the politicians and promoters, the influencers and pretenders, and even people who, like Dolores, didn’t seem to care, combined to produce a momentum of sorts. It seemed now momentum was carrying us forward into a big mistake, a tearing apart the American character and the traditions that make us one out of many.

In a way, I envied Dolores. I envied her lack of engagement with the news. Her lack of engagement freed her from what weighed heavily on my mind. For me, the news had become a constant aggravation. It was disheartening and discouraging, and yet, I always wanted to know the latest. Other than the knowing, I couldn’t do anything about the days’ events. I could not change momentum’s needle.

Dolores lacked my compulsion to follow the news. I don’t know how she did it, but she was able to let it all go by. I wished her happiness.

The idea that the country was making a big mistake brought to my mind all the relatively insignificant mistakes I had made in my life. They were burned into my memory and impossible to correct.

And now, the big mistake too felt personal. Like all of my mistakes, once the damage had been done, there was no way to fix it. The only remedy for a mistake was to stop the mistake before it happened. What was required was engagement and the light of truth.

I said to Dolores, “If we are lucky, just enough people will decide they’re fed up with the way things have become. Maybe there are just enough people to save our country, to get us back to the democracy I thought for most of my life we had.”

“Our country is in no real danger,” Dolores scolded. “You always exaggerate.”

“He’s sending troops into the streets, and you say I’m exaggerating?”

“I’m sure it’s only temporary, and it is making people feel safer.”

“I don’t feel safer. Do you?”

“Well, at least he’s doing something about crime.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s committing it.”

I could not believe that Dolores was okay with the threats and insults targeting cities run by Democrats, sending soldiers trained for combat into neighborhoods where they’re not wanted or needed and sending in the troops without respecting the local elected governments.

“ICE agents are dragging people off the streets who have not committed any crime and packing them off to foreign prisons without a trial. The ICE agents have been coached to treat people as less than human. They are overpaid, ideologically-trained thugs in masks. Are they ashamed to show their faces? It’s not right. It’s not how Americans should behave.”

“I am all for immigration, so long as they come legally,” Dolores said.

“Who knows how many are here legally? Congress has failed to fix the immigration system. There should be an orderly, efficient and speedy process to enter the country legally, but that is not happening. The people they are rounding up have no chance to prove that they have crossed the border legally or have tried to. They are just frog-marched like criminals onto airplanes and hauled off to El Salvador or God-knows-where.”

“That’s only what they deserve after they have invaded our country.”

Our country. Dolores was missing the point, and not for the first time. I wanted to ask her, “Who qualifies as us?” and “When did this country of immigrants become ours?”

Neither Dolores nor I would be here having this conversation if our great-grandparents had been excluded the way these latest immigrants were being rounded up and deported. But that was so obvious, I decided not to bring it up.

There was a slow burn in my gut, a gnawing feeling that things weren’t right. Were enough people paying attention? Were enough people engaged and outraged? Would the momentum shift? Or would we make mistake after mistake after mistake until “our” United States would vanish before our eyes?

Dolores was getting irritated, so I decided to change the subject.

“What do you think about his plans to build a ballroom?”

“A what?”

“A ballroom. He wants to hook a 90,000-square-foot ballroom onto the White House. It will be for rich people who are missing their balls.”

“Oh, yes. I heard something about that,” she said. “Is that big?”

“Yes, it’s big.” It seemed that Dolores felt okay about a ballroom for wealthy guests, so long as it would be a small-scale ballroom. “He’s already erected a super-sized 90-foot flagpole and paved over the rose garden.”

“He did what?”

“I imagine his wife complained about her stilettos getting stuck.”

I hoped that it was a mistake that could be repaired in my lifetime.

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Some other stuff for later,