The Great Rearrangement

Sept. 22, South Addison

“Multiple Hazards in Effect.” “NOW,” the bright red box on the Weather.gov site fairly screams.  

I click on the icon.  Today’s dangers are high surf and a killing frost, but, thankfully, no hurricane.  A few days ago, a neighbor I met out on the street warned that a hurricane with the fetching name, Teddy, is coming.  More disorder, more fear, more uncertainty.   I picture the winds picking up and battering the spruce and the firs, the shingles and windows, imagine the heavy sound of surf as it pounds its way ashore.  I imagine sitting in the house, in the dark, feeling battered, waiting for it to pass.  

Though I confess, there is something else I feel about hurricanes.  Something thrilling and galvanizing.  Ever since I was a child awaiting a hurricane’s arrival at home, half a mile from the ocean on Long Island, I have felt transfixed by the hurricane’s power to rearrange and disrupt.  To reconfigure and even to destroy.  My father, too, was transfixed by these storms and as soon as their eye had passed, he would put on his raincoat, climb into the blue wood paneled Mercury station wagon and prepare to drive towards destruction.  Eager myself to see the newly rearranged world, I followed him out to the car and settled on the seat beside him.   Silently we drove the darkened streets, navigating around downed trees, through high water, searching. 

One year, we drove the causeway down to Jones Beach, eager to see the fury nature was capable of.  In my mind now the waves are menacing and huge, like the enormous head of Moby Dick as it rises from the water and, open jawed, smashes the Pequod in half.  When we arrived at the beach, my father and I got out and walked on the edge of the sand.  Years later, I still remember the way the force of the wind shrank the outer layer of fabric on the raincoat I was wearing.  From then on, whenever I wore that coat, two inches of white lining flapped like a loose slip below the dark green of the outer layer. 

Hurricanes reveal things: the vulnerability of low lying neighborhoods, the sodden, intimate contents of roofless houses: waterlogged pink blankets, a kid’s stuffed Teddy Bear, an unmade bed, how insubstantial life is, how mutable.  Hurricanes rearrange things: maps, foundations, roads in and out of places. 

A great disruption arrives the day after my neighbor’s warning about Teddy.  It is not in the form of wind.  It is the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose untiring work for women’s equality before the law and whose fierce championship of a more just and equitable society stand as a great inspiration to me and millions of Americans. 

I do not need to go searching.  A terrible storm has been blowing through this country all summer, and now with RGB’s death it will grow much worse.  Efforts to replace her before the election will cause fear to rise, hope to be menaced, anger to flame higher and hotter. 

With this turbulence blowing through every branch of our lives, we are, I believe, on the cusp of a great rearrangement.  The moment is galvanizing in a way I have never experienced, even in 1968 when the streets on the South Side of Chicago where I was living at the time burned.  It’s possible the results of this moment could be devastating.  But it is also possible they will be thrilling.

American has been hiding its faults, its rot for years.  The pandemic has blown the roof off our country and we see that America has many an unmade bed, many cracks in its foundation.  We see things now which wake us to the need for changes, for big changes. We want something better for ourselves than this divisive, distrustful relationship with our country and our neighbors we wake to every morning.   

Empathy and connection.   The secret to change, in my fifty years’ experience of helping people do just that, is not education or moral suasion or shame or coercion or even fear.   It is empathy and connection — either for another or coming towards you.  I believe the stories, ours and others, about the economic and social and personal effects of the pandemic, coupled with the video of George Floyd’s murder, have awakened an empathy in many of us for people who were invisible to us before.  I believe the experience of the pandemic is helping us feel connected to each other in ways we were not before.  Many of us are hurting.  Our pain connects us to others in pain.  We are all unmoored, uncertain, untethered.   All the secret ingredients for change are here, right on the table, between us, waiting for us to do something different. 

I think it could happen.  I think we could transform ourselves, rearrange ourselves.

I am hoping that when the results of the election are decided, when the eye of the storm has passed, I can get in the car, and drive towards the toppling of all the old order of things.  I am hoping for a newly arranged map, new roads going towards new horizons for all of us. 

Right now, the wind is blowing hard outside, the screen door is banging open and shut, the thick birch trunks are swaying violently in the wind.  Let it blow. I am waiting for the great rearrangement.