The Hard Landing

I’ve written less in the last few months because the election has consumed so much of my mental and emotional bandwidth, and what I’ve wanted for and from this space is a retreat from the exigencies of the political moment. So I’ve been trying to focus on small acts of attention: flowers and food and the occasional history lesson; walking daily in my garden in spite of storms and stress; thinking about seeds for the season ahead. (We’re in a “weak La Nina” so we can “winter over” more foodstuffs and keep the garden going through the darkest months of the year and who doesn’t want that?)

All the while, in my heart I’ve nurtured a thread of hope, a cock-eyed optimist’s belief in the promise of America. Yes, America, that little vixen—sure, she might

Out tomatoes and eggplants are still producing even though it's November, the month our fall-blooming camellias are at their peak.

make you weep by night, that America, but joy would come in the morning…

Well, the light of that hope guttered low the night of Nov. 5, 2024, then was utterly extinguished around 3 a.m. the next day.

To be honest, the thread was gossamer thin to start.

In 2023, the earth hit 1.48 degrees C of global warming—just a hair below the “catastrophic” 1.5-degree mark climate scientists have warned of for decades. 2024 blew past 1.5 degrees without without any further ado, and after a spring of tornado outbreaks and a summer of fires, our climate chickens came home to roost with a vengeance with the back-to-back blows of hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The cobweb I’ve been clinging to was the pipe dream that, with moderate policies, a kinder, gentler leadership at the helm, folks who might let science drive policy in the White House, we might achieve a soft landing from the climate impacts that are now unavoidable and accelerating. Kinda like Biden saving the economy (which apparently no one believes actually happened though we all witnessed it)—except for climate policy.

But no. Our culture has chosen the hard landing—drill, baby, drill; deportations. Project 2025—for reasons so selfish and yet so vacuous that they boggle the brain. Black men held the line for Sister Kamala, but large pluralities of everyone else—white, Latino, Asian/South Asian, Native—voted to chain our nation to a man whose vision of the melting pot is ethnic cleansing and whose vision for our precious earth is apparently that it should resemble one of his golf courses.

So, for my own sanity, I’ve turned it all off. I can’t with the circular firing squads of blame on the one side and the gloating and threats on the other. I can’t with the pep talks and calls to action and I’m done with memes. I’ve avoided all media. I’ve used social media only to check on my friends.

Wednesday about 10 a.m. I briefly joined a prayer circle on the steps of my building—and I thank the college chaplain for helping me to access my tears, which had gone completely dry so deep was my despair. But I can only laugh at the memes my Christian sisters are sharing. There’s something funny and yet so sad about people praying so hard to a God and a Bible that our enemies are using, at the same time and in the same spaces, to rejoice at our defeat and promise us further retribution.

I was raised in the church, and found Kamala Harris’s Sunday morning appearances wholly authentic…

kamalaharris

A post shared by @kamalaharris

But the season of weeping this election has unleashed upon us will last for longer than a night, I fear.

Not all my friends are Christian, thank heaven. Shout-outs to my atheist pals, who always bring clear thinking and good common sense to the table. But as I said, I was raised in the church, so I will be seeking spiritual sustenance — just elsewhere. Indeed, the only people making any sense at all to me these days are my Palo and Santero brothers and sisters. These New World religions, grown from ancient rootstock during the Middle Passage and its immediate aftermath, describe better than any the nature of the powers eating the soul of the nation. The world.

More to the point, they teach that you need not sit back and let the powers devour you.

So here’s to eating and not being eaten. As times change…