A sudden prospect of despair and jealousy gaped before me, at mention of this. Oh right, I thought. I'm trapped. He's not. For the barest instant, I felt some tiny taste of what it must mean to be an exile or refugee, to have one's home country seen as a generator of problems, to be eyed as needy and suspect.
It is hard not to see a terrible grim karmic rebalancing at work in this. Here we are in a nation which for years has treated immigrants and refugees with scorn. Ruled by a president who calls our regional neighbors—places where many of our fellow U.S. citizens and residents originate—"shithole countries."
For decades Americans have seen people from troubled nations arrive at our borders and have said: "get in line." "Why don't they stay in their own countries and fix things there, if they've gotten so bad?" "Why do they have to bring their problems here?"
So now, it is fitting that we are the world's shithole. We are the failed state whose incapacity to contain a pandemic has made us dangerous, deadly, and unstable in the globe's eyes. If we were to descend on the Canadian border, we'd be told, "why don't you get in line?"
And it is that same president who called other places "shitholes" who has gotten us into this situation. The same politicians who told other people to stay put and fix problems where they were who have failed utterly and manifestly to solve the biggest problem we are now facing as a society.
All of this is so unsurprising that it came as a big surprise to us.
People all thought - maybe I thought it too, at some subconscious level: Trump's so unconventional, maybe he can actually get something done. There are all these intractable problems that the normal politicians haven't been able to fix. Why not give an unconventional one a try? Maybe what we really need for big problems is a big personality like his.
False. He failed. We rolled the dice. We gave him that try. He failed. He failed spectacularly; and in precisely the way that someone with his pathological personality would be expected to fail. Turns out that betting on "maybe he'll surprise us" didn't pan out.
Remember how we thought: maybe he'll pull a "Nixon goes to China" and become the raging xenophobe on the campaign trail who finally gets us comprehensive immigration reform once he's in office?
No. The raging xenophobe on the campaign trail became the raging xenophobe in office, who has completely dismantled all of the asylum system and shut down practically all legal immigration. Who'd have thought? Funny how people sometimes refuse to reward our counterintuitive hot takes.
Sometimes, people are all-too horribly intuitive.
Remember how we thought: maybe he'll partner with Democrats on infrastructure and actually get something done? He likes buildings and things, right?
Pelosi and Schumer even went to his office that one time. They were like: maybe he'll take an interest in infrastructure. Here, Donnie, look at these blocks! Do you want to play with these blocks? Or these train tracks? Or these big dump trucks, vroom vroom?
"No!" screamed Donnie, and hurled the blocks against the wall. Oh well, scratch that one. I guess the big man-toddler decided to behave like a big man-toddler. Who'd have thought?
And so here we are with the greatest global challenge of recent history. And still we think: Maybe he'll surprise us all by coming through. Maybe he'll rise to the occasion and display a depth of character never previously in evidence.
(We were nothing if not willing to grant second chances. We always gave him the benefit of the doubt.)
But no. He failed. He failed to contain the virus. Then he started actively spreading it. He deported people who had tested positive for the virus to countries with weakened public health systems. He tried to force universities to choose between reopening on campus or losing international students—an ICE directive apparently designed to force more universities to return to in-person classes.
Why would he desire this? Why would it be a good thing, politically or by any other logic, to force more students to violate social distancing and die?
Because, if Trump cannot contain the virus, he would prefer that we all collude in pretending the virus does not exist. Because he demands that we all join him in wishing it away, in order to make him look good.
Because, as in North Korea, the famished children must be swept off the street when the foreign dignitaries arrive, so as to avoid having to acknowledge that the regime is failing to feed its own people.
Because we must all agree to inhabit Trump's Potemkin village where, in front of the reality of mass death from a pandemic, he has placed a cardboard facade of normality. Nothing to see behind that curtain, folks!
What do we do then, my friend and I asked. Leave?
No, he said. (For him it was a decision. For me, something closer to necessity. But what better way to accept adversity than to embrace it as an act of will?) We should stay put, and try to fight for the version of this country that should be, he said. The one that still can be.
The patriotism within me swelled. Yes. I called to mind the words of Anna Akhmatova, in explaining why she did not depart the Soviet Union, after so many other writers and intellectuals did, and despite her own conflicts with the regime: I’m not of those who left their country / For wolves to tear it limb from limb. (Thomas trans.)
If others are going to sneer and say "why didn't they stay and fix things where they were," by god we will do so. We will shake our fists at Canada and say, we stayed put, when all was lost, and saw this country through its darkest hour!
There's a lot to be said for making a virtue of necessity. As Descartes remarked, better to change one's desires to fit the world rather than the world to fit one's desires. After all, if I could change the fundamental facts of the situation, I would be so inclined.
"I mean," said my friend, after we compared the places we were born, "what were you thinking?"
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