A Very Long Silence, Take 2

This is very difficult to write.  I'm hoping that with time, it will become easier, but who knows?  The fact is that I've been completely silent here for over half a year.  And there are several reasons for that.  I've tried writing something to start over, but I haven't liked anything that I've written so far.  It's been too easy to get too philosophical, too negative, too whatever.  I don't want to write negative stuff here--it wouldn't serve the purpose for which this blog was started in the first place.

But the fact is that my silence has been the result of incredible negativity in our country.  My silence has been the result of the mourning and the grief that I'm still going through--the country that I used to know is gone, and it's being replaced more and more, day after day, with an authoritarian regime, the likes of which none of us ever thought we'd see in this land.  But here it is.

The four years that I served in the Army seem like a waste of time now.  I served to help--in a very small way, of course--to preserve the freedoms and the democracy that has made this country great in the past.  But I find now that the country has been taken over by the very wealthy, and they're doing everything they can to redirect as much money as possible away from the people who don't have much of it and into their own pockets.  They're kidnapping people off the streets without any due process.  They're passing laws and making rules without any checks or balances, turning this country into little more than a corrupt banana republic, the likes of which we used to read about with gratitude that our country wasn't like that.

Imagine that.

The grief is such that it's caused my wife and me to look to leaving the country to move to a place that isn't a totalitarian nightmare.  We want to give our children a place to go to when and if things here fall apart so far that life becomes dangerous for anyone who opposes the government.  We want to live in a country where people aren't kidnapped on the street by thugs in masks and no uniforms, and then sent to what are basically concentration camps thousands of miles from where they were abducted, even to countries they've never lived in, with absolutely no due process.

The harm that's being done right now is difficult to witness, especially when I know that I personally can do nothing about it.  As a teacher, I'm horrified at the models of "power" that our young people are witnessing and learning from.

But more than anything else, I'm at a loss as to how I'm going to continue sharing thoughts and ideas about living life fully when so many people are having their freedom taken from them, not to mention their ability to simply live their lives in peace, much less to live them fully.

I'll get there.  Many people are going through much worse these days--think of Gaza for just a moment--and what I'm going through doesn't come near what they're dealing with.  But that doesn't make my loss or my grief any less legitimate.  It's going to take me time to internalize it and deal with it effectively, and to get to a point at which I feel I'm living my own life fully once more.  And I will get to a point at which I can write again, hopefully even slightly effectively.

I never expected anything like this, but life does, indeed, throw curveballs sometimes.  I know that my main task now is to go with the flow rather than fighting it, and finding my own ways to resist the horrible things that are going on in so many places, on so many different levels.  I'm not going to play the victim, but I do need time to grieve the loss that is very real in many of our lives right now.