What Are You Doing Next Wednesday?

Thanks to my dad’s passion for fine coffee, I acquired a comparable taste for it as a teenager—when Hills Brothers and Folgers ruled the world and only specialty stores stocked the hand-roasted beans we favored.   So when Patti and I took the kids to the British Isles during the summer of 1974, we found nothing but instant Nescafe that I quickly pronounced undrinkable, and since tea tastes to me like chewing on tinfoil, I went cold-turkey for a month or more. 

Imagine my ecstasy when our return flight was on Pan Am, an American airline that was sure to brew some mighty sturdy coffee.  And they did.  I immediately slurped several cups almost before we were airborne.

And for the ensuing six or seven hours flying across the Atlantic, I was soaked in sweat and ravaged with jitters as the massive fresh infusion of caffeine sizzled throughout my system. I suddenly realized that, like most who gradually grow into multi-cups-a-day coffee drinkers, I had acclimated myself to the truly abusive effects it had been inflicting on my body and mind. Absent that conditioning, I was ripe for toxic assault.

Fast forward fifty years.

Until three days ago, I have been sequestered for a week by myself on a silent one-person retreat in a seaside cottage on the surf-roiled coast of Maine.  I went there to be totally incommunicado.  I went hoping that hour after hour of sitting by myself all day long, day after day, embracing the sounds and smells and vibrations and spray of white-capped swells crashing on the rocks at my feet, would enable me to ponder more deeply the meanings and future of my life in these waning years.  [More about this in my next blog.]

The day I returned to New Jersey I was overcome with joy to be home with Patti again.

But the next day, I was feeling grumpy.  Acting grumpy.  Short, snappish, impatient, contentious, pissed-off.  I’m all-too capable of being this way almost any time, but Patti recognized my surge of aggravation as particularly acute.  So she asked what was going on. 

Grateful for her question, I knew the answer instantly: I had suddenly re-immersed myself in the hyper-toxicity of current American culture–the dread, the uncertainly, the denial of facts and the ruthless faking of truth, the gullibility of the needy, the endless and fruitless efforts to predict the outcome of next Tuesday and to ponder how best to cope with whatever it might portend for us all—and I was hating it. 

It took a month free of caffeine for my body to suddenly get walloped by  the exceptionally toxic effect caffeine has on us day in and day out. 

But took only a week free of obsession with the cultural catastrophe of present-day America to get walloped by the toxic effect of our nonstop, gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing, head-shaking worries about our future. 

Mind you, everyone is worried sick—we liberal types, but also those who see things differently. That’s exactly what Donald Trump planned for, and has successfully created.  Covid killed a million of us.  But the pandemic of mutual suspicion and unbridled hatred he has evoked is killing us all, and killing America.  He cynically yearns to stand smirking astride the wreckage.  No wonder we are worried. 

But I once had a mentor who never failed to offer definitive perspective when something important was afoot.  As I struggled with one particularly daunting challenge, he remarked,  “My boy, your worry is nothing but an inadequate idea hovering over a center of fear.” Get that: worry is nothing but an inadequate idea hovering over a center of fear.

Come what may next Tuesday, Americans of good will—however many that may still be—are urgently called to engage in pursuing E Pluribus Unum. Not all our fellow citizens want that any more.  And whoever is in the Oval Office next January may be a powerful ally, or may be the most odious saboteur of that work.  So it is unquestionably a daunting challenge.

But it’s still our work, no matter what.  We are the ones who are called to do it.  There is no one else.  No one else.  So starting next Wednesday, we must collegially determine what may be inadequate about the wishful ideas we are currently harboring, transform them into pragmatic initiatives, and move resolutely away from that center of fear as we lock arms in bringing them about. 

That is exactly what America's Founders did so many years ago, at personal risk of life, liberty, and wellbeing.  They bequeathed us a republic, in hopes we could keep it. The keeping begins anew next Wednesday.