Annihilated

Two weeks now since Election Day and I’m still feeling annihilated. I’m not sad and I’m not angry. I knew this was coming. I could see it everywhere I spent time over the past year and a half. I could see it in the yards, in the storefronts, in the parking lots. I overheard it on sidewalks and in lines at the store. I felt it in all the pushback during my conversations. I knew this was coming and I was not surprised.

So I’m not sad and I’m not angry and I’m not surprised. And I’m not satisfied by those things when ordinarily I’d take any one of them as an opportunity to be just that. But I’m not. I’m not satisfied, I’m not feeling smug, there will be no I-told-you-sos. Not now, not down the road.

It took me a while to understand what has happened to me. Annihilated is it. There is so much inside me that has ceased to exist. It’s gone. It’s not simply an emotional matter. I understand myself and know that, yes, deeper in the details I am sad and I am angry, and that I’m even frightened by the prospects of chaos ahead. I feel them all in their moments when I look back over the shape of the year. So when I say I’m not sad or angry, I’m saying they don’t govern me or dictate my mood.

What’s gone is my sense of citizenship. It’s no declaration of sovereignty; I have a license and passport to maintain, I am subject to laws and will pay taxes. I will obey signs and regulations. But these are gestures now, empty of everything except the desire to avoid personal hassle. Beyond them I am gone. I feel no obligation to the collective. I do not belong here. I feel no notion of conscience when it comes to anything about being American anymore. Any spirit of national identity has been fully supplanted by the potential for any gain to be found in the personal freedoms provided by the notion of every man for himself.

I am generally difficult to confuse, but other than waving its flag and wearing its colors, I do not know what it means to be patriotic in the United States anymore. Beyond presenting the colors, the demonstration of real American values varies by zip code now. Sharing the wrong American myth in the wrong American place has become an invitation to insult, if not violence.

I am not of that. I will not celebrate it. I will not fight for it. Instead I will adapt to live in it. I will participate in our American scheme only to take from it what I can. I may even lie to do so, in one zip code or another, describing my exploitations as success and calling my dishonesty the freedom of speech.