Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Like some of you, perhaps, I turned down my media dial as the 2024 Presidential election reached its climax. I ignored the polls. I avoided the news beyond scanning headlines. I encouraged friends to count on the youth vote to carry Harris to victory. I quelled my fears with hope.

Post-election, I continued to look the other way. I refrained from “doom scrolling.” I stashed the urgent emails from organizations I support. “Action is the best antidote to despair, and the time to act is now” the Sierra Club advised. “My profuse thanks to the thousands of volunteers who fought tirelessly for democracy and freedom,” Substack’s Simon Rosenberg gratefully wrote. I don’t know if my 500 get-out-the vote postcards to citizens of Montana and Nevada counted as tireless. 

I sought distraction. Having discovered Grey’s Anatomy on my flight from Portugal back to the U.S. three weeks ago, I did something I’ve never done before: for the next ten days I binge-watched this legendary TV series, now in its 21^st season. Wondering whether surgical intern Meredith Grey and handsome resident neurosurgeon “McDreamy” would turn their lust into a lasting relationship became my obsession. The repeated scenes of patients being brought back to life with herculean measures, however, became more than I could stand. Was there a defibrillator for a crashing democracy?

Yesterday, I plunged into the vortex of post-election, post-mortem discussions I’d been avoiding. I was reminded of the “M&M” (morbidity and mortality) conferences at the fictitious Seattle Grace Hospital I’d been watching on Netflix.

I’m aware that my “go-to” list of media sources reflect my own body chemistry — a.k.a. biases — just like the medical profiles of patients at Seattle Grace dictate their response to different treatments.

Here’s a sample of what drew me in. (You’ve likely caught some of these yourself; my partner, Tony, warns me that this may be boring.)

Despite my misgivings about how The New York Times covered the presidential campaign, it remains my starting point in gleaning the news. I read opinion columnist David Brooks’ “Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right,” arguing that Democrats lost sight of the nation’s greatest inequality: education. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s essay, “If You’re Sure How the Next Four Years Will Play Out, I Promise: You’re Wrong” was chastening: 

Humans may be the only species that can imagine an unknown future. But that doesn’t mean we’re any good at it. We’re routinely wrong about which career we’ll choose, where we’ll end up moving and whom we’ll wind up loving. We fail even more miserably when we try to predict the outcomes of national and global events. Like meteorologists trying to gauge the weather more than a few days out, we just can’t anticipate all the variables and butterfly effects.”

Yet a hunch about the future can feel like a certainty because the present is so overwhelmingly, well, present. It’s staring us in the face. Especially in times of great anxiety, it can be all too tempting — and all too dangerous — to convince ourselves the future is just as visible.”

No less conflicted by The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a candidate for President, I turned to the Post, typically the second course in my daily media diet. The headline “Go bags, passports, foreign assets: Preparing to be a target of Trump’s revenge” caught my attention, although it was one of those stories based on anonymous reveals.

A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packeda “go bag” with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee.

A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration.”

A determined hiker since moving to Oregon, I relished Rusty Foster’s letter written along the Appalachian Trail — “Election Day in the woods, in a nation of  cruelty and grace.”

New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino’s essay “How America Embraced the Gender War” was stark reading for this “second-wave” feminist: “The big two genders are said to be at war. The results of the Presidential election can hardly be read otherwise: in preliminary exit-poll data out of Pennsylvania, women aged eighteen to twenty-nine swung forty points for Kamala Harris, while their male counterparts swung twenty-four points for Donald Trump. The conflict—the dark, snarling, many-headed beast of indifference and contempt that emerges from these numbers—has been building for decades.”

Contributing writer Lauren Michele Jackson’s essay “The Naivete Behind Post-Election Despair,” on the role of postmortems, opened my eyes.

The postmortem is meant to make sense of tragic occurrences and yet, at bottom, it is designed to soothe. ‘What went wrong?’ is a perfectly sane response to something gone wrong, and the postmortem helps relieve that question of its daunting open-endedness. Secure in its knowledge, forensic in its detail, it is an account of past events which comes complete with quiet warning for the future. 

Contrary to the title of the long-running TV program, people prefer solved mysteries—or at least a passable theory of the case. There’s a reason we too often recall that first line Joan Didion dispensed in her White Album: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ If the best thing is for the worst to not have happened, then the next best thing is to be told how and why it did in terms that are familiar, dulling shock with explication.”

A newcomer to The Guardian, I agreed with former US secretary of labor Robert Reich’s “The Democrats must become an anti-establishment party.” The real lesson of the 2024 election, Reich argued, is that “Democrats must not just give voice to the anger, but also explain how record inequality has corrupted our system, and pledge to limit the political power of big corporations and the super-rich.” 

A long-time fan of Ezra Klein, his most recent podcast “The End of the Obama Coalition” offered, as always, lots of food for thought. His guest, columnist Michael Lind, argues that the Democratic Party in recent years has become more beholden to special-interest nonprofits, which claim to represent large constituencies but actually reflect the interests of the donor class. I had never considered this. Klein and Lind discuss what Democrats could do to reconnect the party and its core voter base.

There was little to laugh about on late night TV.  At the start of Wednesday’s episode of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert confessed to doing “not great.” “Some people said to me, ‘Sorry you have to do a show tonight,’ which is nice of them to say. But I don’t have to do a show. I get to do a show tonight. No one enters the comedy business because their life worked out great. We’re built for rough roads.”

“It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him,” said host Jimmy Kimmel. “But guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too, you just don’t realize it yet.” 

And then, of course, there is the detritus of Trump’s unqualified, break-everything cabinet appointments. Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times laid it all out Sunday, in chilling detail: “Trump Signals a ‘Seismic Shift,’ Shocking the Washington Establishment.” The president-elect’s early transition moves amount to a generational test of a system as he seeks to rewrite the balance of power and install lieutenants to blow up key parts of government, Baker reports.

The fact that Trump’s “lead” among those who voted (60 percent of eligible voters) has now slipped below 50 percent does not cure this seismic shift at the top.

___________

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken and afraid, as I’m sure many of you are too. I still have faith in America, but that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

If only it were as simple as one pundit put it: “Put one foot in front of the other. Repeat.” 

I am confused now, more than ever, where to put my social justice energies as I age out of activism plus travel, sequestered now in a small town in  Southern Oregon in a decidedly blue state. My Denver son tells me that it’s time that we move close to him, that our almost five-year-old grandson needs us in his life more than ever. Our Brooklyn family wishes for the same.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s issue of The Guardian, Robert Reich writes “A peaceful but determined resistance to Trump must start now.”

The pull of Grey’s Anatomy for me — beyond the obvious soap opera moments — are its reminders of the fragility of life and relationships. Each episode opens with a voiceover, usually spoken by the title character, Meredith Grey. 

On occasion, other characters get the opportunity to do the voiceover. Being a surgeon can be heartbreaking work, as seen in many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. “If you aren’t willing to keep looking for light in the darkest of places without stopping, even when it seems impossible, you will never succeed,” resident Amelia Shepherd tells an intern who assisted her in a surgery that failed.

Miranda Bailey, another resident, is loud, passionate, and believes in tough love. Due to this, some of the most magical moments of the series are when her caring, vulnerable side surfaces. “The fact that we show up for each other, in spite of our differences, no matter what we believe, is reason enough to keep believing,”she counsels.

“All of us, at one level or another, are wounded and scary,”  Meredith Gray says early on. “The challenge is to trust and be trustworthy.”

Last night, instead of digging deeper into the seeming collapse of the world as we know it or watching another episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I turned off the lights and sat in silence, listening to the sounds of our furnace rising and falling and feeling my breath come and go. 

We need to know when to rest, too.