January 20, 2017: Inauguration Day

Bear with me, I'm unloading a lot here.

The human brain is such a mysterious and fantastic thing. This morning, my brain cued up this clear-as-a-bell memory:

I was with my family at a gathering hosted by my Grandparents (immigrants, holocaust survivors, activists, socialists) at their small apartment in Brooklyn. I feel like I was maybe 5 or 6 years old. I can't remember the reason for the gathering, but about fifteen friends were there, sitting around the dining room table and spilling into the living area. I was sitting on someone's lap in the middle of it all, and the conversation turned to politics--specifically, it must have been about access to healthcare. TRULY, I remember this! After a while, one of the men asked me what I thought about all that was being discussed. I clearly remember responding, without a moment's pause,

"You mean some people go to the hospital but don't have to pay? That's not fair. Everyone should have to pay the same."

It was a room full of kind people, and they laughed at me gently: The child had said something so contrarian! With such conviction! When it was time to leave, one of the men shook my Dad's hand and said with a wink and a smile, "She's a conservative republican now, but we'll make sure that one day she's a liberal democrat." Clear. As. A. Bell.

I don't think I ever saw that man again. But somehow, during the course of my relatively apolitical, insulated childhood (Carter: waiting in lines at the gas station that snaked to fill the entire parking lot; Reagan: the Iran hostage crisis marked in days on the bottom of the T.V. screen each night), I began to understand my place in the world, and my sense of fundamental fairness righted itself. **CLUE: Not everyone can pay the same.** By the time I sat watching the news of Operation Desert Storm from my college dorm, I was progressive-democrat enough to feel indignant, worried, objecting--this President's policies and priorities were vastly different from my own.

I wish with all my might that I could tamp down the disoriented anguish I'm feeling today, and liken it to the sensation I had watching Desert Storm unfold in 1991--the vague, inconvenient feeling of having to endure the presidency of someone I didn't vote for. I wish I could chalk this pit in my stomach up to politics, and our country's special brand of you-win-some-you-lose-some democracy. But I can't. I've not arrived here, today, without educating myself. I've not neglected to read and watch all I could find around this election, this President, this new age. I have held tight to the beautiful truth that everyone gets to have their own opinion. I have tried to be judicious and fair as I've parsed through the stories, the clips, the soundbytes, the tweets, trying to tease out something that looks bright and hopeful. For all of my trying, I have not found a single redemptive bit.

And yet, after so many years of having lived comfortably (even, I'll admit it, smugly) in a world that has, at best, vehemently supported, and at worst, civilly tolerated my leftish p.o.v., I finally understand--and viscerally feel to the point of shaking--the electricity in the adult voices gathered around my Grandparents' table in 1976. My mysterious, fantastic brain connected that day's memory to this day's reality for me this morning. And in that instant of remembering, I was re-connected both to the actual outrage of the people at my Grandparents' party, and to their conviction that critically important things were not at all right--that these wrong things had to be fixed. That they, the voices in that circle, could and would be a part of the fixing. That they would make me a liberal democrat one day. And here I am, and here we are, and so I cling to hope.