Mornings are strange these days.
The sedative haze of sleep slowly begins to lift, and my conscious mind starts taking inventory and assembling the data and reporting back its initial findings:
I’m in bed… I’m awake… I’m alive… It’s Thursday…
But most of the time, that’s about as far as I get when I am suddenly assaulted with another, far more sobering realization:
I’m in America…
… S**t.
And, in a disorienting few seconds, I’m violently ripped from any sense of peace or rest by the lengthy litany of atrocities from the previous day: the Constitutional crises, the acts of unthinkable brutality, the falling away of systemic safeguards, the metastasizing mass of sycophantic cultists.
A jolt of adrenaline comes flooding in as my barely awakened body senses imminent danger without me needing to do a thing other than remember the lawlessness of our President, the complicity of his party, the bent knees of the billionaires, the genuflecting of the Church, the capitulation of the Press, and the snarling brainwashed rabble of once-reasonable, decent human beings with whom I used to feel at home.
And just like that, mere minutes after returning to the waking world, I want to go back to sleep, already exhausted, already disheartened, already grief-stricken.
It gives me absolutely joy to say that on most days now, I hate waking up in this country.
I confess to regularly daydreaming about being an expat: of putting new roots into foreign soil and reclaiming somewhere else what it feels like we’ve lost here.
I find myself imagining what it would be like to greet the day in another country, someplace where racism wasn’t celebrated, where compassion wasn’t a character flaw, where corruption wasn’t so prolific, where hatred didn’t find such safe harbor from its leaders and their disciples.
Yet, I know the reality is that some of this is me lamenting the devil I know: that while seeing America with a microscope and the rest of the world with a telescope, my vision is not as clear as it could be.
Yes, there are certainly a myriad of places on this planet where gun violence is not ubiquitous, where illness does not bring bankruptcy, where Science is not assailed, where religion is not legislated, where diversity is not reviled, where education is not under siege, and where democracy is not evaporating. But these places have their own dangers and demons, and both time and proximity would surely reveal them.
So while I do hate waking up in this country and I do dream of waking up in another one, perhaps it isn’t about my geography changing but about me changing the geography I find myself on.
Maybe I don’t want to wake up in another country but in a more beautiful version of this one; an America that embodies the greatest of its aspirations, one that more fully becomes what the songs and anthems promised we could be, one that would be worth someone else inheriting.
I’m not going to pretend I’m sure that such a place is still possible. It may be that the systemic damage we’ve sustained in the last nine months is irreparable. Our collective bloodstream may be so poisoned with tribalism and prejudice that we cannot recover. The unholy marriage of Church and State may indeed be too far along to drive a wedge between.
But I suppose that’s why they call it a dream.
And while I am beginning yet another day here exhausted, disheartened, and grief-stricken, I am going to find a way to step out into it and do all I can with the light and the hours I have before darkness and sleep arrive.
And if millions of us all do the same, maybe one morning in the future, we will find ourselves greeting the dawn not with sadness but jubilation.
Right now, I hate waking up in America.
I want to wake up in a better one.
Do you struggle with the reality of the nation you wake up in? Is it difficult to find the resolve to keep going? How are you holding the tension between wanting to leave and wanting to stay and fight? Let me know in the comments.
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