How It’s Going

I keep meaning to write a thing but my bones ache with a fatigue that calls to mind the early months of pregnancy. If it was that, this would be a different sort of note. I am driving in the mid-afternoon, alternately pinching my nose and my earlobes to stay awake. When I finally park, I think I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, and then it’s dark.

Democracy in the US is being dismantled from inside the White House but naturally everyone in passing periods between bells keeps on asking one another the usual questions. That is, when we’re not having clandestine conversations in which we agree to either pull the fire alarm if ICE shows up or at the very least to put popcorn in the microwave, set it for ten minutes, and walk back to class. Even though we think that the members of that organization would, if they had any sense or were at all in communication with local law enforcement, know better than to wear their jackets around here. We smile weakly while rushing to get in line for the single working bathroom between passing periods and say How’s it going? Like we don’t know. 

Oh, you know, we say back to each other. In a certain tone meant to indicate a wry awareness of a mutual understanding of professional obligation to carry on. With preventable infections poised for a major uptick, now by some measures is no time to start risking a loss of health insurance––except. But anyway, the kids are still here so who are we to go leaving now?

Where news is still being reported with any measure of integrity, it comes at such a rate and speed that you may find yourself shaking your head with a face in the posture of the sort of disgust that appears to be on the verge of a maniacal laughter, in response to a story that in a time not long before this one would have left you weeping.                               

And you thought yourself to be hardened before, having seen so closely so many sides of men you wished your children would never know. 

But here they are with their slick tongues and weak eyes, coming. The age of changing regimes with tanks and masked soldiers charging into conference rooms is decidedly passé. These killers walk in with khakis and polo shirts, bring donuts for the staff and fist-bump with the confidence afforded only to those at a certain level of remove from the lives of other humans, for reasons that some of us may speculate over, in likely error.

They perform experimental surgeries with words meant to anaesthetize unwitting victims. They call their actions simple cost-cutting measures for the sake of efficiency. They assure everyone they are only after criminals and grifters. Silently, in remote areas, off camera, construction continues erecting maximum-security concrete fortresses capable of housing whole cities. 

One wants to avoid hyperbole in a time like this. The truth is raw enough. But I can’t help remembering histories less than a century old, of another regime overseas, who once used similar language and parallel means––adjusted for context, of course––until arriving at the inevitable problem of exceeding the capacity of state-of-the-art holding facilities. The ovens, when they fired, were not some green monster’s evil plan, but the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with the practical problem of too many bodies than the holding centers could––as the saying went, process.

Which raises the issue again, that monstrous reality of human life and its perpetual inefficiency. The officials shook their heads. Their stomachs turned at the thought of what it meant to stay the course. Yes, of course,they agreed. They could fix this. Just wait, they said. It’s going to be something like you never imagined.