The great shattering has commenced: to begin with.

Turning to Dickens for understanding this moment in history

Dear Reader,

I wrote this essay yesterday, on Solstice, a day when we hold both the vast emptiness of darkness and the small promise of light. The piece reflects these opposing forces. It is inspired by a quote from Steven Lindquist’s 1996 book, Exterminate the Brutes. After weeks of not being able to write anything coherent, of sitting in the dark, I felt liberated by Lindquist’s challenge.

So I raise a toast to us all. To the clarity of the coming light, to the wisdom of sitting in darkness!

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“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Steven Lindqvist, “Exterminate the Brutes.”

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The great shattering has commenced: to begin with.

The Billionaire Bro and the Leader try to defund the government, raise the tax ceiling to make way for a tax cut for the super wealthy who fund the Leader’s whims and his revenge. Farmers, military men and women, victims of disaster, recipients of Social Security, people who have little to eat: all will suffer through the holidays, live out the dark days in cold and fog. But observe. Congress throws a curve, the citizens will not eat gruel this Christmas. Chaos is averted. For now.

The hardest part of this moment when I wake in the night and ponder our country’s political fix is the cold-hearted cruelty of its unfolding. Cruelty nurtured by rage and narcissism, devoid of even the smallest scrap of empathy and compassion. The Leader, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained.”

Do you, reader, recognize that quote and some of the language in the title of this essay? Dickens, Stave 1, The Christmas Carrol. (Read it in its entirety here. ) The only difference between Scrooge and The Leader is that Scrooge was a solitary and unloved man. Even Dickens could not conceive of a character as vile as Scrooge and yet popular, admired, fawned over, followed.

The question of how this has come to be in this country is the question I have been puzzling over in the hours since the election was called and the vile sex abusers and billionaire cheats and misogynists were invited to sit at the Leader’s golden table set with knives sharpened for the task of carving up our democracy until there is nothing left to it but scraps and bones.

Too often in the last few weeks have I found myself lacking the courage to follow Lindqvist’s advice. Instead, I dither, I sort through boxes of old stuff to give away: clothes, dishes, sheets, books. Instead of trying to solve the puzzle of who we are as a country, I turn obsessively every morning to the NYT Puzzle pages!

First, I open Connections on my laptop, and, cursing, try to find the order the diabolical mind of the creator of that day’s game has in mind for the sixteen words in sixteen boxes. Then I move on to Wordle which, as a word girl, I can most often solve quickly. Lastly, I open the Sudoku puzzle and stubbornly choose HARD. Numbers flash on the page and I rush into that jungle of boxes and numbers like someone escaping the roar of a lion or the pursuit of a snake. Ah, the safety in numbers!

But the wish to understand never really leaves me. Walking into a room, sitting down in a chair, listening to stories about the chaos and pain in people’s lives, people looking to me for a narrative which might lead to a new way of living is what I am trained to do and have done for over half a century.

Now I need to do it for myself. And where better to look for help with narrative than to Dickens and his great Christmas tale of suffering and cruelty!

“Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!” ponders Marley, Scrooge’s old money changing partner in his visit to warn the vile Scrooge that by pursuing only the business of the counting house he too will one day be draped in the chains of misery and drag his body through a hellish reliving of his past.

Why indeed. Marley is asking the same question I am asking!

How does Dickens help Scrooge understand his past and avert Marley’s fate? Dickens invites the Ghost of Christmas Past to take Scrooge back in time to observe his childhood. First, he paints us a young Scrooge, left alone at boarding school during Christmas. Next, we witness the early death of his beloved Sister Fanny. Both of these experiences, Dickens suggests, left Scrooge to fend for himself and idealize his isolation and independence and “walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down.”

But my question is not how the Leader’s past shapes his narcissism today, my question is how did our country turn towards a man who all too brazenly and openly declares himself above the law, a man entitled to grab what isn’t his: the bodies of women, the riches of the poor, the entitlement of white male power? A man who lives above limits and seems oblivious to the suffering his rapacious nature inflicts.

My instinct too is to look to our history. It is what I did as a therapist. Tell me your family story. (I wrote a bit about this a year ago in this piece).

Like clouds across the sky, images float through my mind. The 1745 edict posted in Portland’s First Parish Church offering 400 pounds for the scalps of Native American “savages”. The mass slaughter and near extinction of buffalo, the main source of food for the tribes in the Great Plains. The Doctrine of Discovery, the foundational story of this country, which declared European peoples, culture, and religion to be superior to all others and that they, the white Christian men, were entitled to land, to resources and even to the bodies of the “savages” who lived in those lands. Slave ships, their dank and putrid holds jammed with chained bodies, starving bodies, sick bodies, dead bodies soon thrown to sharks.

How does this history shape us all today? To commit these heinous actions, one must hold certain beliefs and blind oneself to others. One must believe in his own exceptionalism and hold the idea that the people you hurt are inferior and subhuman. You must, like Scrooge and Marley, walk through crowds of fellow beings with your eyes turned down. You must silence compassion, empathy, kindness for certain groups of people.

Though we are hundreds of years beyond the days of scalping Native Americans and killing buffalo and chaining slaves, these ideas about our own entitlement, our own greatness, our own penchant for a life without limits on our own personal frontiers are deeply embedded in our beliefs, our perceptions of ourselves and others.

But they operate in the shadows, out of our awareness and consciousness, like unseen strings on a puppet. Asked if we see these beliefs and traits in ourselves, many of us would flatly deny it. Yet, until we come to grips with our history and how its stories about what and who we are, dear country, we will continue to repeat the past.

Freud 101. Bring the unconscious into consciousness.

What is it then that we can do to become more aware of the awful harm caused by the shadows of our early beliefs about the exceptionalism of white America, the limitlessness of our Frontier, the entitlement of our race? In my profession, awareness of our unconscious motivators is called insight and imparting insight to a client is called interpretation. Insight and interpretation. How do we offer that, dare to presume to offer that, to the people who are lined up behind Trump in hopes of his restoring a MAGA order and culture?

I know one thing we can’t do. We can’t lecture. We can’t establish DEI departments in Universities or non-profits. We can’t walk around tisk tisking about the folks who aren’t woke. Did you squirm a little a few paragraphs ago when I offered my interpretation of how our past has shaped our present selves? Did it sound like righteousness?

Better, I believe, to read stories, to tell stories, write stories. Read 1619, read The Nutmeg’s Curse, read Claudia Rankine’s brilliant conversation on racism in America today, Just Us. And this Christmas, read Dickens. Dickens didn’t lecture his readers that accumulating wealth without compassion and limits would condemn Scrooge or us to a miserable life. Instead, he told us stories, took us inside the home of a poor family, the Cratchits, whose son, Tiny Tim was gravely ill. And he introduced us to two wretched and starving children.

Through imagery and dialogue Dickens afforded Scrooge and all of us the opportunity to feel compassion and empathy for the suffering of those less fortunate than we, those whom we might have passed by with eyes lowered or judged to be not as worthy as ourselves.

Read Dickens and then imagine the suffering that immigrants to this country have experienced in their lives that drove them to leave their home and come here. Imagine the suffering of the poor in this country who live without healthcare and enough food and have no access to good employment, the suffering of women who are denied ownership of their bodies.

Does empathy for others give us insight into ourselves? Yes. Indeed. If I have empathy for the Native Americans here in Maine who were driven off their land and deprived of their foodways by dams on rivers and pigs in their fields, will I not be more likely to look at myself now and wonder if, like the early colonists, I too might be holding on to beliefs about their incompetence and holding them back in some way. I am looking at you Janet Mills and your refusal last year to correct the abuses of the Settlement Act.

We have a choice: go forward in the next year with empathy, feel the pain of others less advantaged than we and find ways to speak up for them. Or we can follow the lead of the man whose great skill is crushing empathy under his foot. MAGA MAGA follow me and you do not have to face our heinous past, you do not have to submit to the limits of our resources, the limits of our sexual desires, our greed, our fantasies of our own exceptionalism.