The DOGE and Aging

Adlai Stevenson III (1930 – 2021) entered the 1982 race for Illinois governor just as I had become unemployed. My only memory of that forsaken job, like all the others, is my shameful obsequiousness to the forgettable male boss.

A journalist friend, Paul Galloway (1934-2009) interceded on my behalf to the Stevenson campaign for a volunteer position. Yes, that was necessary. And still. The sublime expression, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” originated in a Chicago ward campaign office. Campaigns still scrutinize volunteers with more than an eye roll. Because of my juice through the local newspaper, people were cautious about what was said around me.

I floundered around the office of Adlai Stevenson’s wife, Nancy, who was usually out campaigning. One day, I had the great fortune to be tagged to drive her to Oak Park for an event. That fluke set off a campaign-long assignment as Nancy’s driver.

Nancy and I regularly stepped into community rooms where older adults were having lunch through the federal Meals on Wheels program. Older women would clasp Nancy’s wrist, pull her ear close to their lips and whisper messages for her to take back to her husband. The Meals on Wheels crowd assumed Adlai III was his father, Adlai II, the governor when most of them were young. Nancy, who had a gentle and keen understanding of aging, let most of them hold this holy untruth. She displayed genuine kindness in her friendly interactions with old people who were in obvious cognitive decline. This helped me admit my own subconscious bias toward the aging. My ageism has changed overtime, especially now that I’m old and experience age discrimination against myself and my friends.

Meals on Wheels is funded through the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program which was permanently authorized by Congress in 1972. The purpose is three-fold: 1) reduce hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition; 2) promote socialization; 3) promote health and well-being by preventing health-related diseases. The Program is available to adults age 60 years and older. Priority is given to low-income individuals, racial or ethnic minorities, rural communities, those with limited English proficiency, and/or those at risk of institutionalization.

One of our campaign stops was a community space in the neighborhood of Hegewich. It is located on the far south side of Chicago, known as the perfect workingman’s neighborhood. When Chicago’s steel mills shut down in the 1980s, the Polish immigrants who’d settled in Hegewich lost their jobs. They also lost their pensions. People survived on government subsistence and odd jobs.

As Nancy began her round of shaking hands, bobbing up and down to lean over to hear the messages of the elderly, she announced, “You know, my husband, Ad, voted for Meals-on-Wheels when he was a senator in Washington.”

Before she could get out another word, a large woman in the corner who looked like a George Booth cartoon yelled:

“Yeah? Well, he oughta be here now for the corned beef! ‘Cause it stinks!”

“Well, I’ll be sure to tell Adlai!” Nancy shouted back.

Funding runs out on December 31, 2024 for the Older Americans Act and the Meals on Wheels Program. If Congress doesn’t vote to reauthorize the Act, the Nutrition Program will be at the mercy of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And they have vowed to eliminate all programs that have not been reauthorized by Congress.

My guess is neither of them have come to terms with ageism.

Get Up! Eat Something! Christian Fundamentalism and Trump

AMERICAN CIVIC LIFE

By Regan Burke NOVEMBER 14, 2024

Kenosha, WI. Aerial View. (Paola Giannoni/Getty Images)

Hal Lindsey’s doomsday prophecies in “The Late Great Planet Earth,” stoked the born-again Christian fundamentalists in the cult I surrendered to in the early 1970s. One hundred disparate spiritual seekers in Toms River, New Jersey, accepted Jesus Christ as a personal savior, a necessity for inclusion in the Fellowship.

Churchmen directed every aspect of the lives of their blue-jeaned outcasts. Husbands were the heads of the household, women didn’t work. We lived in separate homes but were discouraged from socializing outside the Fellowship, lest we be influenced by 1970s secular humanist ideas — like having credit cards. The proliferation of credit cards, one of Satan’s tools to create a global economy, was a sign of the end times. We boycotted the Bank of America because the bank sought to legalize interstate branch banking, thereby centralizing all the country’s money into a single entity, another Satanic plan, a.k.a. globalism.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible, Hal Lindsey in “The Late Great Planet Earth” sensationalized end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies. He connected them to current events as proof of the coming Rapture where Christians would be plucked from the earth and taken right to heaven, thus avoiding Armageddon. Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion, as prophesied, were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches — both in 1948. Everywhere I looked in the 1970s, I saw signs of the end times: an increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism, and the birth of the European Union.

When my son joined Little League in the first grade, I sat away from the other parents in the bleachers. I feared the wrath of God if I talked to anyone outside the Fellowship. Church members accepted my volunteering for Jimmy Carter for President in 1976 only because my husband supported Carter. They doubted his born-again bona fides because of his family policy.

After four years, I extricated myself from the Fellowship, left my abusive husband, and drove my nine-year-old son 800 miles west to a new life in Chicago. A group of Christians at La Salle Street Church who had experienced similar religious cults nursed me back to spiritual and emotional health. The ideas of Hal Lindsey dissipated into the ether of bad dreams. After a few years, I no longer looked for signs of the end times.

Until now.

Donald Trump, in a 2017 speech to the Joint Congress, announced he was not the President of the world. Instead, he stated he was the President of America. These words and those of Trump apologist Steve Bannon announcing a nationalistic government free from links to other countries sent a signal to anti-globalists around the world. Alexander Dugin, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, commented on Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaiming that traditionalism won and globalism lost. Alex Jones uses globalism interchangeably with the New World Order and the Deep State. Are these guys aware they’re heeding Hal Lindsey’s warning to resist Satan’s plans for a global economy and one-world government?

In Kenosha, at the door of a new white house in a new white neighborhood with curvy streets, low trees, and developer-landscaped gardens, I knocked on the storm door, bang, ba-bang, bang. A huge white Old English Bulldog slid around the corner from the kitchen. He ran to the front door and barked as loudly as his docile voice would allow. His owner barely held him back.

I shouted through the door, “I love dogs. It’s ok. Can I pet him?” We all smiled, including the dog. He came out to greet me and gently pushed his massive stubby body against my legs.

‘Hi, I’m with the Kenosha Democrats. Have you voted yet?”

“No, we’re voting tomorrow.”

“What’s his name?”

“Arnold.”

“Arnold? Like Schwarzenegger?”

“Yes.” We both cracked up as Arnold dutifully looked one to the other, pleased to hear his name.

“You know, Schwarzenegger just endorsed Kamala Harris.”

Thus, I established my purpose in knocking on her door on a bright white Saturday afternoon.

“I know!” she said. Then she mouthed the words, “I’m voting for her.”

“Oh great,” I whispered, “Thank you.”

As I crossed the street to my next house, a white SUV suddenly sped out of Arnold’s driveway. It stopped in front of me. She rolled down the window and shouted, “I’m for Kamala! Going to vote right now!”

I thought back to her open door and realized someone else had been rattling around in the kitchen. A husband? She couldn’t let her husband know she was voting for Kamala Harris? Is this a sign of renewed influence of Christian fundamentalism?

Anthropologists say that authoritarianism, old-age anxiety, border disputes, memory disorder, pandemic uncertainty, virtual reality, environmental issues, and gender trouble put society in a self-protective liminal state. We now stand in the doorway between the Biden and Trump administrations. The entire Trump presidency may turn into a self-protective liminal state.

Liminal, from the Latin, “threshold,” puts time and space betwixt and between. On liminal days, we often wander aimlessly, unsure where to go, what to do, stare out the window, quiet down. Hush. The past and the future dangle off the edge of time. Do you feel it?

“Why did God dump Trump on us again?” a friend asked, squirming in her liminal state.

“God didn’t do this,” I said. “We did it.”

It began long ago. The anti-globalist cult surrounding Trump follows bunny trails through the woods of end-times literature, movies and evangelists that we have derided, failed to understand, take seriously, refute or diffuse.

Pastor Tom Are of Fourth Presbyterian Church Chicago says, “The church is not always lost in wonder, love, and praise; sometimes, it’s just lost.”

When we step over the threshold, away from our involuntary liminality, into the perfect, friendly, and loving world created for us, we’ll find the wisdom we need to activate our role in the future. Some will join the opposition party. Some will move to Costa Rica. Some will run for office. Some will hide immigrants. Some will help women. Some will march with the saints. And some will find a no-news thin space to wait it out.

While we wait, we can practice letting go of the obsessive hope that the built world of institutions will save us. It won’t. Let it go. Instead, lean on the unseen, the un-built, and the natural world. Eat and sleep.

In the Hebrew Bible, God said to a self-pitying Elijah, “Get up! Eat something!” And after Elijah spent forty days indulging in self-care, God came back and said, “Why are you still here? Get back to it. You’ve got work to do!”

And so we do.

______________________

Reprinted from Interfaith America Magazine, November 14, 2024

Schadenfreude Radio

The radio. How I love the radio!

Transistor radios first appeared on the shelf behind the cashier at Walgreen’s, alongside the cigarettes, in the 1950s. The purchase price was cheap enough for my mother. I can’t imagine what my life would have been had it not been for the radio.

In our teens, we lay on the floor, smoking pot and singing to the Beatles on the radio. A friend once mused, “our lives would be more manageable if it weren’t for the radio.” Every half hour DJs stopped spinning records and announced the news. Radio news. It stirred me up for life.

The radio these days is an Amazon Echo. It is set to turn on NPR at 7:00 am in my house these days. On Sundays, I usually ignore a 7:00 am show called Hidden Brain. A neuroscientist interviews interesting enough people, but I just want to hear the news at 8. Recently I put off walking the dog and making coffee when I heard the voice of Dr. James Pennebaker on Hidden Brain. He talked about how people’s language, written and vocal, signals what’s happening inside their heads.

James Pennebaker is a social psychologist at the University of Texas-Austin. He taught me that chronic pain can be healed through expressive writing. His recipe, grounded in scientific research, consists of writing it down. Just write it down. It’s cheap, easy. And it works. My writing teacher Beth Finke and I used to call it bibliotherapy. Pennebaker’s books are sweet old friends. The same goes for Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, and Howard Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain. Thinking of these now butters my memory with gratitude. I write because these authors taught me words can heal. And, for the most part, they have.

I’m not particularly interested in interpreting the language of my friends. I don’t want to know what’s happening in their noggins as Pennebaker does with his research subjects. No, what’s tasty lately about Pennebaker is what he says about Donald Trump.

He examined Trump interviews from 2015 to 2024 and found a whopping 44% increase in words plated in the past. What’s that mean? Well, usually presidential candidates dish out rhetoric about the future. Pennebaker says Trump whips up such simple words and sentences that he can only be described as “an incredibly simplistic thinker.”

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

I loved hearing this. And there I was again, glomming on to any tidbit that humiliates and demeans Trump. It’s called schadenfreude. I love that word but ashamed how I delight in its meaning: the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another.”

Schadenfreude is one of the delicious habits I metabolized, after using Pennebaker’s and others’ writing exercises to relieve chronic pain. Obviously this is not a vice easily kept at bay. Availing myself of some form of spirituality, like meditation, helps. And the writing, of course.

But for now, it’s back to the radio.

It’s not lucky to be almost assassinated

She came to me at nine years old with an incomplete backstory. No longer a viable breeder after age five or six, the owners kept her way past her financial contribution to the family. She’d delivered two litters a year, about 100 puppies. “We just liked her,” they told me. My inquiry, “I’m an old lady dog-lover, looking for an old-lady dog companion,” hit just the right tone. “You’re an answer to our prayers.” And so I got Elsa.

The day after the attempted assassination of the former president, I hungered for Sunday air. You know, the first day of the week kind of air, where everything starts over. Air that requires nothing. No lofty thoughts, no reflection, no opinions, judgments, or conclusions. Sunday air. I breathe Sunday air when singing a well-known hymn like “It is well with My Soul”.

When peace like a river, attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot

Thou hast taught me to say

It is well, it is well, with my soul

And when the preacher elevates my being with no effort on my part, I breathe in the Sunday air of love.

Sunday air was unattainable at church last week, though. It was not well with my soul. Right off, the preacher prayed “for former President Trump, grateful he did not succumb to political violence. This world is in love with violence, a violence that threatens the best in us, so renew in us a commitment to the Christ, who calls us to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbor, to love our enemies.” On receiving this, I sucked in a big chunk of we’re-gonna-lose and couldn’t seem to exhale.

The sermon choked off any puff of relief— a parable about prayer that meant nothing to me. My diaphragm would have swelled during hymn-singing, but the tunes were unfamiliar yawns.

And so, airless, I vamoosed to the outdoors, home to fetch Elsa for a trip to the park to watch tennis players sweat it out. She was too hot to sniff around the edges and lazed in the shade instead. Until a tennis ball bounced toward her behind the chain link fence. She bolted for it and dug into the wire to try to slay that green fuzzy rodent stunt double. She would have broken her teeth to get to it. A tennis player picked up the ball, a good ball, and tossed it over the fence with big Sunday air to Elsa, who received it with the gusto of a kid catching bubbles. She flaunted her prize using all the primal dog moves that delight dog-loving humans. I never knew she was a ball dog.

Echoing Bill Maher, Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller asked his spirit guide and Managing Editor, Sam Stein:

“Can I say Trump is the luckiest dog on the planet?”

“No! You can’t say that.”

“I can’t?” Asked Miler.

“No! It’s not lucky to be almost assassinated.” Said Stein.

But Elsa. She’s a lucky dog.

The Big Freak Out

Metaphors have frittered away from me. To be fair, they hadn’t much choice. In conveying messages to contemporaries over the past few years, whether speaking, emailing, texting or DM’ing, I’ve developed a necessary plain spokenness, lest the meaning be misconstrued, misunderstood or confusing. Fallout from this mind-bending prosaic language is living at a level of plain thinking, another aspect of old age (I’m 78) that I wish I’d been warned about.

While watching Joe Biden perform at the now-famous CNN debate in June, I came unstrung in the grip of knowing that Biden’s plain-thinking, plain-speaking style was killing any chance of beating Trump in the November election.

“Oh. my. god. He’s like my neighbor Ray,” I thought. Ray, who used to converse like a college professor and remember your name like you were his student, but now he talks only sports and weather. Ray, who cannot grasp metaphors unless they’re baseball sayings he’s used all his life, like “on the ball” or “step up to the plate” when he motions for you to exit the elevator before him.

On an unsually quiet afternoon, that is to say, no sirens, no gas-powered lawn mowers, no garbage trucks beep, beep, beeping as they backed out of the alley, I was studying David Montero’s new book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations. My book group decided to read two chapters at a time in order to absorb a history none of us had ever known. The premise that the intellect is stimulated through awe and wonder has proven true in this group, with this book. Montero’s research thoroughly tracks how the free labor of Black people in the South became the basis of the entire US economy and her dominance over world markets. His writing is loaded with similes and metaphors.

“The energies of three million enslaved people were organized into an industry, industrial enterprises were increasingly fertilized by slavery, and the output of the system was shipped across the world.”

(All of a sudden, a swift “click-clum” in the room interrupted my reading. I turned and saw a ragged chunk of dried-up old paint on the floor, fallen from the ceiling. Surely there’s a metaphor here. Chip off the old block? Chip on your shoulder? Paint the town red? Naw. Nothing. I got nothing.)

In the chapter, “The Union Must Perish,” Montero included a white abolitionist’s account of his travels to the slave market of Virginia. Published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1850, part of it reads:

“…this was the most heart-sickening sight I ever saw. I involuntarily exclaimed, “Is it possible that this is permited in my own native country—the country I have loved so well, and whose institutions I have exultingly pointed to as an example for the world. If this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.”

The emotons expressed are precisely what I feel now that the Trump-appointed United States Supreme Court ruled that the President is unbound from the rule of law and can freely engage in criminal activity. Our Christian Nationalist Supreme Court looks forward to the next president closing the borders to anyone but White Christian Europeans, slashing gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights, and requiring biblical education in public schools. Echoing the 1850 abolitionist, if this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.

There ain’t no metaphor for that.

Believe in the Devil

In my twenties I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior in order to belong to the bible fellowship I had been attending with my friends. I “became” (as if that were possible) a born-again Christian just before Jimmy Carter, also a born-again Christian, announced his candidacy for President.

I volunteered every spare moment for Carter’s campaign, a Democrat who proclaimed himself a sinner, saved by Jesus, just like me. After he was elected, some men and women in my small community bible fellowship preached that Carter was a tool of the devil, because he promoted sex education and family planning in public schools (today’s purity tests are abortion and gay rights). I had naively become part of a Christian sub-culture that wanted no government interference in family matters. These Christians yoked Carter’s actions to his character and denounced the whole man as the anti-christ. That’s what evangelical Christians did then.

What Evangelical Christians do now is the exact opposite. Those who support Donald Trump have an ends-justify-the-means theology. As long as abortion is outlawed and gay rights are quashed, the means to get there (coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on his potential political opponent) are not only ok, but justified, even applauded. Donald Trump’s interior life is not considered important or relevant, nor is the outward display of his character. They worship the end product.

In his book, Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz notes that Aramaic, the language of Jesus “…does not draw sharp lines between means and ends, or between inner quality and outer action.” There are no words in this ancient language for an ends-justify-the means psychology: a person with unrepentant character defects is so unlikely to perform noble deeds that it cannot even be talked about. Logic follows that a person who provides immoral leadership is likely to be of ignoble character.

A guy named Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer established an ultra-conservative, ultra-secret Catholic lay organization in 1928, Opus Dei. Followers learn to abandon their principles, that the ends always justify the means. They believe Trump was chosen by God to protect the unborn fetus and restore Judeo-Christian moral order. Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr is Opus Dei (as are other Trump appointees). Doesn’t this explain a lot?

I left that Christian cult years ago. However, I understand, even admire, their members’ rejection of Jimmy Carter because they considered his views on sex education immoral. I disagreed with their opinions but I too measured his character by words and deeds and came to a different conclusion. Perhaps this ancient Aramaic Jesus language trickles into a collective consciousness enabling some to see inner qualities and outer actions as one big squishy blob and accept or reject that whole person.

I keep asking myself what’s wrong with those Evangelical Christian (and conservative Catholic) Trump supporters. Don’t they care that his morally corrupt outsides match his morally incontinent insides? Their religious fervor veils their eyes to the hypocrisy Jesus condemned. They justify the deeds of their beloved lawbreaking reprobate. Have their souls separated from their minds? Or as Rev. William Barber has said, “After this year (with Trump) if you don’t believe in the devil there’s somethin wrong with your fuckin mind.”

The Fresh Coast

When some people speak of the Midwest

They talk as if she’s the jilted cinderella

Whose prince neglected, and I must defend her,

Not always cold, no oceans or mountains, sister,

But 600,000 sandhill cranes wade in her water.

The east coast comes to play sport, play act, pay

To play, play around, play the innocent, put in play.

The west coast comes to run by, run.

They say nothing eventful happens to her.

Then they blame her for Trump.

How I Do Without Hate

As a reward for living through every day since November 8, 2016, I look to Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. Each day I try to do without hate. But I judge each day’s news as the worst thing I ever heard. Every. Single. Day. A bit of solace comes briefly through a pint of ice cream.

Doing without ice cream when the emotional alarms clang requires me to Hold myself tight for fear my limbs, my tongue, my head will whirly-gig out of control and irreparably damage my spirit-mind, not to mention my friendships. The Hold relaxes briefly with one simple pint. And then I do without until the wind gusts the whirly-gig back into motion.

Holding myself together generates an inward turn I take without looking both ways. I involuntarily drive straight to the core where I look for Jesus. From 2003-2011 I worked in Cook County government with a lively crew where the listening was easy. I belonged there, with cultures other than mine. God manifested himself through black and brown christs who spoke of Him: Have a Blest Day, Stay Prayerful, Jesus Loves You. Whenever the bosses above dumped demons into my serenity, Big Jim appeared and quietly laid a copy of a page from the Bible on my desk with a comforting Jesus quote circled in red. John 8:10 I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

The Catholic nuns gave me Jesus in grade school. He walked beside me like an imaginary floppy-eared bunny. As a newly-formed adult I moved from certainty about God and his Son to doubt. Preachers told me to welcome doubt, to throw certainty out with the th-6 evening garbage, that doubting God strengthens faith. And it did. Until I started doing my own version of God. I built a periodic table of spiritual elements with blocks of God-info such as heaven and hell don’t exist and Jesus’ Resurrection is simply a symbol of renewed life. Trouble is, I silently scorned those who didn’t believe as I did. When I first met my co-workers I held a colonizing view of their beliefs. Over time my religious formulas fell in the trash heap. As slave descendants, they daily transformed their passed-down spiritual trauma into “I believe.”

Now in my own spiritual trauma I yearn for the comforting words of Big Jim and Shunice, for them to assure me Jesus loves us, all of us, including the remnants of the November 8, 2016 tragedy. I look for faith in my post-work world but Jesus is subtly tucked in for the night. My white-only community seems embarrassed, even ashamed to mention His name.

Well, I miss Him, miss talking about Him, miss Him talking to me through the kindness
and courage of my old work friends. A pint of ice cream doesn’t fill the void but it will do to keep the whirly-gig still until the Floppy-Eared Bunny wakes me in the morning.

Morrigan Go Bragh by Regan Burke

On the southwest coast of Ireland known as West Cork, I monitor a murder of grey-backed black-crowned crows cruising around the wild Irish garden of the home I’m visiting in the hills above the harbour of Baltimore, an old pirate town. I’m not a birdwatcher, but enough of a bird lover to know these elegant, regal beauties are not something I see in the trees in or around my home in Chicago.

I sit in the peace of soft rain watching three Grey Crows preen on the dead unpruned branches of an ancient apple tree less than 50 feet from my morning coffee. I throw kitchen scraps onto the stone veranda adjacent to the dining room to entice the 20-inch long birds to come nearer to me. They swoop gracefully from their perch, plunk down and waddle toward the bounty, as I knew they would, like their foraging junk-eating U.S. cousins, the American Black Crow.

I open my laptop and look them up. Wikipedia has not only facts and figures of the Grey Crow but also a link to Celtic myths and legends of this western European corvus. I click into the world of Irish folklore where the Grey Crow is known as a manifestation of The Morrigan. The Morrígan is a mythical figure, a foreteller of doom and death, deriving her name from the word “mara” connoting terror or monstrousness as in night-mare. Mara is my older sister’s name. The “rigan” in mor-rigan translates as queen, as in my name, Regan. Mara-Regan equals Mor-rigan, or the nightmarish queen, manifested in the Grey Crow keeping watch o’er my morning. So here I am on my Irish vacation, hiking heather and heath, having great craic with my Irish host, Vivienne DeCourcy, when I’m reminded that my sister Mara and I are ferally joined for all time in blood and tradition.

“Mara” has a place in many traditions. It means bitter in Hebrew, demon in Sanskrit. My mother benignly named my sister, thinking it a noble Gaelic name for Mary, never researching the root of it. The human Mara lived up to the historic iterations of her name: she killed me off before I was born, bullied and tormented me as a child until, as a fully-ripened adult, she declared she no longer considered me a part of her family.

This new knowledge awakens old fears and crams them into a contemporaneous morass. Is The Morrigan perched outside my window an omen on this mid-August day in 2017 as Donald Trump is heralding white supremacy in mythological statements that intertwine fact and fiction? Some say ancient Irish bands of young lawless warrior-hunters who lived on the fringe of civilisation were dedicated to The Morrigan similar to the white supremacists’ infatuation with Trump. The tenants of this wild Irish countryside fear Trump is a modern-day Morrigan cawing out lunatic signals, picking at trash and digesting hate. I trust Trump is a temporary danger, unlike Mara whose talons are forever embedded in my soul.

Hazmat Blues by Regan Burke

One hundred and seventy days into the Trump Administration I flew to Washington DC for the annual board meeting of the national anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN.org, (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network). Lively meals with DC relatives, the board meeting and coffee afterwards with old political cronies were old-shoe comfortable and safe, though conversations periodically broke into expressions of danger. This is, after all, the nation’s company town, Trump’s ground zero.

I arrived at the Washington National Airport an hour early for the non-stop flight home to Chicago. Packed with fellow travelers, pop-up phone and sunglass vendors, fast food and maintenance workers and airline personnel, the terminal sizzled. I managed to nudge a stool into a space at a long table rigged with outlets and nose-dived into the computer-news rabbit hole: click, Trump crashed a wedding at one of his resorts, click to an old story about a sinkhole in front of Mar-a-Lago, click to a twitter storm of jokes about draining the swamp.

Annoying conversations buzzed my ears about a hazmat incident at the control tower. Click! a local TV station reports fumes from roof construction at the Leesburg, Virginia control tower has shut down all flights for 4 airports around DC. Click. Is Steve Bannon, the President’s sneaky architect of distraction, trying to terrorize awaiting airline travelers? Or did he sabotage the timetable to turn the screw on some disagreeable Administration insider?

The announcement came. “…we don’t know when flights will continue, we’ll update you as soon as we know.” It was 10:00 pm when I learned my flight was cancelled until the next morning. The United gatekeeper told us all the hotels were booked for 50 miles around and that maintenance crews would be handing out blankets for those who’d be sleeping in the airport. No problem, I’d just contact one of the five people I know in DC and ask to lay my aching bones down on a couch. Click. Click. All five were non-responsive. Travelers were staking out their spots on the floor. In front of the gatekeeper I pleaded, “I just cannot sleep on the floor. I’m old and have arthritis. Is there no other solution?”

He shook his head.

“How much would it cost to get to the nearest hotel?”

“Sixty miles away? About $100.”

“Oh no. Are you giving vouchers for cabs?”

“No”

I was dragging my carry-on away from any hope of a reprieve, doomed to slumping to the floor by Dunkin Donuts, when a young man pressed something in my hand.

“Please let me help you. Take this.”

A $100 bill. Before I could thank him, my FaceBook message lit up with a query from Dan Murphy whom I hadn’t seen in 10 years: Click. “FB is telling me you are nearby! Can I see you?”

And right then, I was no longer afraid to die.

Click.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: Trump