My old friend and colleague Marty at Blair Academy in New Jersey wrote the other day, saying, “Hope I can outlive this mess” and asking how I’m faring.
I wrote back: Three or four days before the election I felt in my bones that Trump was going to win. Tuesday loomed and I needed to divert myself. I began a large-scale basement project — walling off a laundry room, making accessible lumber storage racks for all my furniture wood finds and remnants, and constructing a better workshop tool wall with much needed drawer storage space. It took me a couple of weeks and kept me from obsessing both before and after election day.
The whole basement is now neat, clean, and light. It will be a pleasant space where I get to exert some control over events and dictate what and when. In short, a temporary respite from an irrational and topsy-turvy world.
Of course, I also read. Fiction at bedtime is an escape of sorts. (Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead proved timely and compelling.) A lot of what I read is ominous, but at least now the cards are openly displayed for all to see. In this regard, I was actually relieved to see Trump won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. At least we don’t have to deal with the ludicrousness of a minority victory, although we must strenuously oppose the manipulation behind Trumpists’ use of the words “mandate” and “landslide.”
I said “ominous.” Take, for example, the New Yorker article on cryptocurrency and, among other things, the successful attack on Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and warnings about AI. Technology has already undermined rational democracy. In the hands of a few with a lot of money, it will continue to degrade the sociopolitical landscape. How can things get better?
Having to think about what motivates swing voters — well, I might prefer to cut off my pinky instead. DEI and wokeism. Young men who get their information from Joe Rogan and social media. Men who have swung from Republican to Democrat to Republican to Democrat and back again to Republican. Hmm, I’m not sure I see misogyny as a swing activity. Perhaps parsing it all will prove revelatory.
A million other thoughts, some colored by getting older, some by the colder weather and coming winter that at some point will put an end to my long late-afternoon bike rides. I have taken great comfort in the network of old roads and paths in the National Seashore. Imagine riding on a mile-long east-west path through the woods and arriving at the dune’s edge and a vista of the mighty Atlantic churning below. The ready-made cliché would be to focus on the eternal quality of the natural world and find solace there. Which I do, up to a point. But the ocean is heating up and the glacial scarps are eroding at an alarming rate. At least one north-south path is no longer traversable because the cliff under it has collapsed, and another is threatened.
But climate change is a hoax. Drill, baby, drill.
And now we are witnessing the erosion of common sense, decency, truth, empathy, and tolerance — the values we lived by as teachers. The flame is flickering. Burn, baby, burn. Enjoy your guest talks in Blair’s history classrooms, while I focus my pedagogical instincts on my grandchildren.
Andrew Hay lives in Eastham.
