OCTOPUSES

OCTOPUS

    It is hard to keep track of all the things to be freaked out about these days. The killing of Renee Good, Kremlin-parroting Tulsi Gabbard’s FBI raid on the Fulton County, Georgia election office, the little boy in the bunny ears cap detained under the command of dog-killer Kristi Noem and then sent to South Texas, where a few days later, and thanks to the dead brain-worm informing the decisions of RFK, Jr, there was a major measles outbreak. Somewhere in there Alex Pretti was killed, and I thought finally, finally, the nation is hitting its bottom; right?

       Of course not, because there is not going to be a bottom anytime soon. When I first got sober, in total hopelessness and degradation, but still not convinced that I had to stop drinking—maybe I was overreacting!—old-timers told me that the disease of alcoholism is an escalator that only goes in one direction, down. The next floor down makes the current desperation look like the good old days. And I believe this is also true of the disease of golden elevators.

    No matter what cruelty or corruption came flying at us from the  tennis ball throwing machine of power, I could always figure out my  next move in personal generosity and the peaceful mass response by people of good will.

     And then, yesterday afternoon, while I was sulking in the back room about what I misinterpreted as a slight by my personal husband, speed-eating a whole bag of Skinny Pop popcorn and muttering that men are pigs,Trump posted the Obama ape video.

     Let me repeat that: Trump posted an Obama ape video.

     Now, looking ahead, I think the visual of this Truth Social will help us a great deal in the midterms, but all day yesterday it left me speechless, looking everywhere in my brain pan for something that could accommodate the president posting the most vile, racist meme about his predecessor. I made up with my husband, in the hope that he could help me with this. He is a brilliant and kind man, usually talkative but struck speechless. We came up with almost nothing, except a story from August, 1989 when my son was born.

    One of my dearest lifelong friends and Sam’s godmother, Peggy Knickerbocker, came home from the hospital with me and two-day-old Sam, to care for us that first week, as I had forgotten to get a husband. (Do you want a guaranteed great seat in heaven, near the dessert table? Help take care of single parents with newborns.)

     One morning we were reading together in the living room while the baby slept. She was reading Vanity Fair, when all of a sudden she looked up, gaping, hardly breathing. As it turned out, she was reading an article about how Hitler had had sex with his niece, and she was literally quivering with outrage. She shouted, “I have HAD it with Hitler,” and flung the magazine across the room.

     We laughed off and on all day whenever we remembered.

     Now the truth is that I have had it with Trump since 2016 and thousands of times since, but I do not think the Obama ape video is this nation hitting a bottom. He is measurably worse every few days. The question is, What do we do?

     We all know the answer: we keep it simple, practical, peaceful and effective. We go left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe. We love people like our lives and nation depended on it. (They do.) We register voters for the midterms, we donate to election watchers, Oxfam, the ACLU, immigrant legal funds and so on. Every day, we do something that helps a little.

     I used to tell my Sunday School kids the story of a young girl whose mother had died, and who, in her grief and confusion, went down to the beach every day, pried octopuses off the pilings farthest from the shore and took them back down to the water.

    One day her grandmother found her doing this, and said, “This really won’t help with what you’re going through. It really doesn’t matter.”

      The girl replied, “It matters to the octopus.”

      In our pain, our grief and confusion, each small act of goodness, love and non-violent resistance helps dilute the toxins that are dumped daily into the common well. Each matters to the octopus