For my morning exercise, I walked downtown carrying a tidy stack of stamped white envelopes containing holiday cards ready to mail. With a good winter coat and scarf, hat and gloves, and a brisk step, I had no trouble staying warm. Near the Post Office, above the general hubbub of car traffic, I heard someone yelling. Well up the block there, a man paced back and forth, agitated, yelling at somebody though nobody was near. His dark coat, pants, and boots looked adequate for the weather, but maybe he had already spent the whole night outdoors. Next, he bent over and scraped away at something on the sidewalk. Then he stood up and took a few steps toward me, still agitated, still yelling. From that distance, I understood only one familiar, rude, explosive word. He tried to size me up, but I angled sharply away toward my destination.
When I came back later, he was gone. Turns out he had scraped the weeds and dirt out of the cracks between two slabs of sidewalk. In the process, he accumulated some pebbles and set them in a group to one side. He was trying to put things in order, maybe, trying to get something out of his system, or both.
Elsewhere in my neighborhood, weeks after the election, that one same bristling, sneering word is still featured on a big political sign at someone’s house. There’s a grim fervor implied by setting up that particular sign in one’s picture window facing the big public school. At another house a couple blocks over, near the front door, somebody’s flying a Don’t Tread on Me flag beside an upside-down American flag. That’s a distress call, that upside-down flag? This double display feels like an affront, as if to say, “If you still believe this is America, you’re a fool.” That’s how I hear it, anyway. A difficult and emotional underground current runs through our community, that much is clear.
On walks, I notice those colorful lines utility workers spray on the cement whenever somebody plans to dig. The painted lines mark where our community’s essential buried utility infrastructure was set in place long ago. They indicate where to be careful with that shovel or that backhoe. A quick internet search shows how to decode the markings, but some are clear without help. A run of yellow lines heads over to the gas meter, and a blue line may point toward a water valve. Many dozens of people over generations did honorable work establishing this complicated underground grid upon which our society is built, then mapping it, repairing and upgrading it when necessary. Three cheers for public utility workers.
And now it feels like another hidden system is in place, streaming false information, anger, and poisonous ideas meant to evoke hatred and paralyze necessary elements of society. This too has been the work of generations, going back at least as far as the presidency of Ronald Reagan. His administration abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, making it a lot easier to lace propaganda into the news. Some presidents have encouraged vast new media empires, giving control over public conversation to fewer and fewer people. And now we have the many benefits and many poisons of the internet flowing through bundled cables under pavement and turf grass into every corner of town.
Years ago, in the Middle East, people joined together to throw a certain dictator out of office. After enough pressure, he made his way to a private jet and fled the country. A writer pointed out, though, that it’s much easier to get a tyrant or oligarch out of the Executive Mansion than it is to get his ideas and his ways of doing business out of vital institutions. After all, he and his people and their predecessors have taken years to seize and strip down and hollow out the same institutions. Scouring them clean and rebooting is the work of a generation.
