What will abide and what will be left behind?
"to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Tennyson
A few days ago I drove into town early one morning to meet a friend for coffee at a local coffee shop a half block away from LLBean’s flagship store. When my car approached the intersection of Maine Street this image confronted me:
I first stood on that ground where the rubble is piled seventy years ago. For my father, born and raised in Brooklyn and son of a man who owned a bar in Grand Central Station, LL Bean was the romantic ideal of wilderness wedded to wholesome outdoor activities: in particular, to fishing. Every summer the family made a pilgrimage from Long Island all the way to Bean’s to find the right fishing pole or reel for my dad. I followed him up the stairs to the wooden planked store on the second floor of an old building and inhaled the smell of cedar and balsam and felt, like him, transported to that place in my imagination where things were quiet, where birds sang and frogs trilled and the lithe shapes of deer darted through the pines.
Over the years, some of the innards of that building were torn down or remodeled, but now, Beans, ever the growing, gobbling corporation it has become, is tearing down that entire building and replacing it with something shinier. Who cares if we gobble up our forests or emit more co2! Growth is our darling. Growth is our sun and moon and stars. Last year, Beans tore down a large office building erected long after we’d moved here and put up a new building with big glass windows but not a solar panel on its expansive flat roof. Watching that was painful. And now we have this dismantling.
The crane with its snaggy mouth at the end of its long arm, the empty sky in the space where the building once stood, the jagged pile of discarded beams: I’ve known that this was about to happen but the reality of it this morning completely shatters me. I
am so overcome with rage and grief that I am shaking. I park my car but instead of going into the coffee shop, my emboldened feet cross the street, headed for the front door of Bean’s bike store which is not being torn down. I yank the door open and go in. At eight o’clock in the morning, with the temperature in the teens, the store is empty.
I pace back and forth waiting for a salesperson to come out. A smiling woman with dark hair emerges from the back and asks if she can help me. A little part of my brain looks down at myself at that moment and giggles in disbelief. No, Kathleen, you aren’t going to go through with this are you? You are an 80-year-old woman who a few years ago was voted Citizen of the Year in this town and you are about to have a temper tantrum in the middle of this store and insult the renowned LL? No.
But my fury overcomes my good sense. I don’t scream but my eyes are fierce, and my voice trembles. I tell the saleswoman that I want her to convey a message to her CEO, Stephen Smith, that I, a longtime resident of this town, feel that his company’s rapacious growth model is destroying our culture, that it is a terrible model for the kids, that the CITI Bank credit card his company holds onto for dear life is funding new fossil fuel infrastructure and if he cares about us he would drop it.
Then I tell her about walking up the stairs with my father in that very place where the crane was ripping up the structure.
Then I cry. It’s all gone now I tell her. Gone. I leave her standing there in the middle of the high-ceilinged store, my rage and grief echoing in the silence.
There is another voice inside my head that understands full well that the sight of the building’s wonton destruction is a trigger for my fury and grief and internal disorder rising from the destruction of a different kind of structure: America. Democracy. The legal system. Our government agencies. Our partnerships with Europe. Everything I have counted on for my entire life for meaning, safety, identity.
I am that razed building. Trump/Musk/the Republican Congress/JD Vance is that wrecking crane.
I am old enough that life has dished out my own plateful of loss and disorientation. I’ve teetered and tripped but while the world spun and I wobbled, I never questioned that under me were patterns, institutions and norms that I could rely on for safety, coherence and predictability.
In his book, Trauma and Human Existence, the psychologist and philosopher Robert Stolorow calls this experience of having no safe place to land the dismantling of absolutisms, and notes that in this state there is neither safety nor continuity of being.
Stolorow believed that the experience of the dismantling of absolutisms was made even more traumatic when it is unrecognizable by others in the community. He posits that this deep chasm “leaves an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude”, a state I readily recognize at this moment when I think about the people in this country who, despite the wreckage of the last 5 weeks, still support Trump and his cruel henchmen.
What are the absolutisms in my life that have been dismantled? First let me acknowledge that my absolutisms are those of a privileged white woman who grew up just in time to see women’s rights expanded, to experience the government’s support in the 60’s and 70’s for community mental health and civil rights and abortion rights and eventually Affordable Care and renewable energy investments.
Here is my list of my dismantled absolutisms:
I feel safe in this country. My money is safe in the bank. My body is safe on the streets during a protest. Government oversight will keep me safe in an airplane. Government research will keep me safe during a disease outbreak. Federal regulations will keep the water safe and the air I breathe safe. My data is safe in my computer. I live in a democracy. The law will keep order around me. I am proud to be an American.
When about five years ago my absolutism about the earth’s future being stable was dismantled by the existential crisis of climate change, I was so shaken to the core of my being that I plunged into climate activism, work that has sustained me and given me meaning and joy and connection at this last bend in the road.
The question now is what will I do in response to this moment of dismantling and with it all the assumptions about what Stolorow called continuity of being: who am I and who is my neighbor, who can I trust, what does the future looks like.
Or maybe the question for this moment is what abides when all else falls away? This stanza from Tennyson’s Ulysses addresses the question of what it is that abides:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
In that spirit I say that what abides for me now is something which cannot be taken away from me despite all the clearcutting of government by the chain saws of the fascist oligarchy. No chain saw can take away my ability to care. Care rises from a feeling inside me and is transformed into action. What that action will look like is evolving and taking shape. Next week I will write a little about that. And I will consider the question of Mercy and how that is informed by care and what acts of Mercy would look like now.
Care was modeled for me by my family and thus connects me back to that child who climbed the stairs behind my father in his annual pilgrimage to Beans. My father was a Republican and so was my Dad’s best friend who was elected Executive of Nassau County, which made him the head of the County government. My Uncle was a Republican Supreme Court Justice in New York State. My family was steeped in politics and law. None of these men misused their power. None of them were motivated by greed. None of them were rich. They were all motivated by care. My father, who practiced law in my working class hometown, took on many a case for people who couldn’t afford his fees and paid him in homemade wine or fresh caught cod.
In this time of the Great Shattering there is unfathomable pain and suffering imposed on people here in this country and, with the cutback in USAID and State Department funding, and our alliance with Russia, on families all over the world. Unless you have had your heart cut out by greed and power ( and I am looking not only at Musk and Bezos and Trump and Exon and the whole Fossil Fuel industry and Citi Bank and its greedy cousins, but at the spineless Republicans in office and at you, Justice Roberts, for consenting to allow the cuts to the USAID program to continue) you can’t hear about this suffering without feeling a deep sense of connection to the lives of the suffering, strangers to us no longer. Care rises from our empathy with this suffering.
This moment is a spiritual crisis as well as a political crisis. What is good, what is love, what is worth doing, what matters, what is our responsibility to each other as well as to the health of the planet?
Perhaps we will as a society reassess our love for wealth and the meaning of success. If the accumulation of wealth is one of the highest goals of our culture, what does it say about this culture that the richest of these wealthy men lack all moral rectitude? That for the sake of palling around with power, Jeff Bezos has sold out the free press that Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post from 1963 to 1991, led so fearlessly. Are these men, the epitome of wealth, the kind of people to admire and hold up to our grandchildren as examples of what they can aspire to be?
In this moment of The Great Shattering there is an opening. A chance to reassess. Who am I? Where am I going? What matters?
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
What will abide and what will we leave behind?
I would be delighted, reader, for you to share your thoughts in the comment section about what you think will abide? What you find still under your feet giving you meaning and will after all this dissolution and destruction?
Note: Solorow wrote that one way to cope with the trauma of dismantled absolutisms is to witness the feelings of disorientation and despair of the traumatized person without trying to in any way to minimize or deny those feelings. My hope is that my story validates feelings you too may be having, reader and that you will in turn help to witness and validate those feelings in others you know.
I too was a pilgrim in the early 70's when we first came to Maine. Little did we know that the Maine Hunting Boot was a myth. Good old Leon ripped off the Sears Roebuck boot and claimed he had some divine inspiration after hunting in wet feet. This company now dances with Citibank the major funder of climate chaos and wants us to believe that they care about the "outside". Yet, the good people of Freeport still clings to the other myth that L.L.Bean really puts the planet over profits. Wake up and shop across the street at Patagonia.
As always, thank you, Kathleen, for sharing your thoughts with us. My favorite book is probably one you know, "On Caring", by Milton Mayeroff. It's a brief book, and although written by a philosopher, it is easily accessible. He looks at the phenomenon of caring and the relationships it both requires and creates. His favorite example to illustrate is the caring of a father for a child, but the phenomenon extends to caring for an idea, an ideal, such as democracy. He sees caring as helping another to grow, enabling that other to care for yet others. I like to think of our caring for democracy as doing exactly that, helping democracy to grow, enabling yet others to be cared for and to care for more others. I like how he identifies the components of caring, such as patience, honesty, courage, knowledge, cooperation, commitment. There is also a structure that seems to be needed. Our carings must be compatible with one another, there cannot be too many, and it allows us to be "in-place" in the world. I see this in social activism, the relationships required and created, the presence of the "components" Mayeroff identifies (honesty, courage, etc.), the obvious compatibility of the objects of our care (environment, democracy, justice, humanity). As you show in your writing, part of the knowledge we need and gain in our caring, is seeing the obvious "un-caring", or even anti-caring of Trump and his minions. Impatience, dishonesty, cowardice, ignorance, selfishness, inconsistency. In this context, perhaps one could say that caring is civics.