Spun Around

October 2, 2020, South Addison

It’s October now.   I feel totally lost.

Gone are all the familiar billboards that used to line the road ahead, the road towards winter.  Gone or stripped of meaning are the images which lure me away from pink phlox, bare feet, ripe blackberries, the early sunrises of dreamy summer. “Halloween at Home” reads the Pinterest ad that pops up on my computer this morning.  I haven’t the heart to open it.  For $10, another digital message announces, I can buy a ticket to the Magic of Christmas Concert at the Portland Symphony.  Online.  It is hard to head towards these meager offerings, this future landscape bare of families and friends safely encircled around a saw toothed jack o’ lantern, a grandchild disguised as a ghost, a roast bird, a bedecked tree.

Up here in Washington County on a half mile stretch on Rt. 1 between Jonesboro and Columbia Falls, there are other kinds of signs that frighten and confuse me. 104 posts, 7 feet tall, twenty feet apart, every one with a metal hook for a flag, some with a white sign and black lettering nailed to the post, the whole display vaguely reminiscent of the old Burma Shave signs.  But not as harmless.  Since July, whenever Bob and I drive to Machias we pass these signs, and I am, each time, lost.

I Pledge Allegiance

To the Flag

Of the United States

Of America

And to the Republic

For Which it Stands

One Nation

Under God

Indivisible

With Liberty

And Justice

For All

I love those words.  I said them as a child at Memorial Day celebrations beside my father who was a Captain in the Army in WW2.  I said them at school assemblies and was proud of being in a country that offered succor to the tired and the poor. 

But now I am spun around like a blindfolded child playing a game of pin the tail on the donkey. Towards what direction do these signs point?  What does the flag mean now?  If I tell you that they were erected by the Worcester family, a family dedicated to laying wreaths on the graves of veterans, will your heart open?  If I tell you that the last time I went to a concert sponsored by the Worcester family at an outdoor venue nestled beside these signs, it seemed there were more Confederate flags on white tee shirts, etched onto white forearms, held in white hands than there were American flags, how will you feel, what will you think?  If I go on to say that Trump’s name was slathered across truck bumpers and red tee shirts, that MAGA hats dotted the panorama of the audience perched on their chairs, what will the signs mean to you now? 

But if I were to complain, to write a letter to, say, the Machias News, that the signs are illegal because these permanent signs are not allowed in the DOT right of way and, furthermore,  that they are political signs that translate as language fostering not liberty and justice but white nationalism and violence, it is I who would be accused of being unpatriotic and against free speech and liberty.  If I say that people who have studied the rise of dictatorships tell us that it is these symbols which are first appropriated, who will believe me?

They are just flags, they are just words, what harm are they to you, how do you know they mean something other than what they say, don’t make so much of it, just let it go, you must hold love in your heart. 

I am so spun around. Lies float by unexamined like whisps of burned paper.  The compass is jiggered and there is no landing point, no North Star.  Only swirling darkness and chaos.  Language is bled out, only its lifeless form remains.  The Presidential debate on Tuesday is so distressing I am sick to my stomach all day Wednesday.  My mind floats in a fog.

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You must hold love in your heart.

Isn’t it the love in my heart that ushers in the sharp hot flash of outrage in my chest when I see those signs? Watch the red-faced scowling President bully and lie his way through the debate?  Isn’t it the love in my heart that makes me wild with anger for the death of my friend from Covid and the other hundred thousand who did not have to die?  For the hungry children whose parents are out of work with no place for them to sleep? For the waiter or jazz musician, or actor whose job has disappeared?  For the uninsured father who can’t afford a life-saving operation for his child or the nurse in the emergency room reusing her only N95 mask? For the black man with a knee on his neck, the black woman shot while sleeping? For the foxes, the moles, the butterflies burned in the wildfires? 

Can we not hold love and rage at the same time?  Does not one give birth to the other?  Is it not love that prepares us to fight for what is precious, wondrous, dear? Is it not love that points us towards the North Star and rage which stirs the energy to keep us going forward towards that star?

 One more month. 

VOTE.