So here we go after Election Day, 2016.

America drank the political party kool-aids, but I am still nursing a brutal hangover. Maybe I should have known better than to listen to anyone at any of those parties. And now I’ve got an uneven, smeary kool-aid mustache stain marking my upper lip. How about you? Are you sporting a political party kool-aid stain on your upper lip? What color is yours? Red? Blue? It’s been more than a couple of weeks now. Will this thing ever fade away? 

Meanwhile, in the fun election-results column, my state of Massachusetts (nouveau-hip Massachusetts) legalized marijuana for recreational use. (Just in time to make all parties going forward more fun than those November election parties!) I’ve lived in the berry blue state of Massachusetts for a long time with preppy, bookish, more-fashion-wrong-than-fashion-right liberals. I’ve also lived in America’s midwestern and southwestern regions. I’ve spent most of my life traveling throughout my country’s still-united states, staying with family and friends or opting to make new friends in campgrounds, roadside motels, and posh resorts. My family is large, with more conservatives than liberals at the table.

But a lot of unexpected things happened inside my American head and heart amid this year’s election noise when I tuned in to listen to surprising conversations with family, friends, and fellow Americans. I found myself confronted with points of view that will never come into focus for me. I realized, in many cases, others won’t ever “get” me and I might not ever “get” them. Worst of all, that old buddy-buddy bromide, “let’s agree to disagree” failed to inspire civility.

All I can say is: Choose your drugs, America, and find your escapes because the country is going to pot. Things are getting crazy and the crazy isn’t crazy fun. It’s crazy effed up.

It happens. Abraham Lincoln did not win the popular vote his first trip to the White House. Would you have voted for him? One of his campaign promises was to allow slavery to continue to exist in the states where it already had destroyed, and was continuing to destroy, generations of human beings. From the day of Lincoln’s election to the day of his inauguration, the ultimate in protest behavior ensued when slave-holding states began to secede from the Union. Were there any other protestors beyond those seceding in the southern states? Tens of thousands, perhaps, from up north? Marching on Washington to let Lincoln know that they were not okay with even a little bit of slavery?

What forms of injustice, and in what quantities, do we allow one administration to create an acceptance and tolerance for, in order to establish a false peace? Do we go along with a little bit of racism? A little bit of misogyny? A little bit of xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia? A little bit of big government controlling the press? Influencing social media? Running personal businesses through the White House and using the White House as a promotional brand? There’s more but my head hurts.

Maybe the impending gentrification and normalization of Dystopia America won’t hurt a bit when our amber waves of grain become verdant stands of pot plants. Some citizens could go back to the closet, back to the kitchen, back to another country, back to un-evolved times in history—while the stoners get to keep coming out of the drug dens.

So whether your vote was influenced by drinking the cherry cherry red kool-aid or the berry berry blue kool-aid or the protest-vote, triple-awesome grape kool-aid or the internet troll-spiked-with-Russian-vodka kool-aid—Hello!—I am among the walking wounded, (as I mentioned earlier), and we are nursing brutal hangovers. America’s 2016 election beat some of us up pretty good. We the people of this great country, in order to form a more perfect Union, did not deserve to have our lives and our relationships ravaged by such epic political drama, dysfunction, and damaging hate served non-stop in heaping helpings from all sides and all players.

America—

—is a nasty country.

And although I’m looking forward to baking warm cookies, decorating the drug den, and hosting a Peace and Make-Love-Not-War pot party for any friends I might have left, I also know it would never heal a heart like mine to create my own utopia and pretend I saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil.

My America is in tatters. It’s shattered. We are not walking the good path of establishing Justice nor are we doing the good work to ensure Domestic Tranquility. And to those who have a simple command for someone like me: America! Love it or leave it!—I have a more complicated response: Hello! (Again.) I am a woman and a mother. I can’t abandon what I love. Any person who has ever parented one or more uber-rebellious adolescents knows love and loathing must often be battled all in the same heart. Any person who has ever managed to build a successful marriage knows this too. Any person who has ever been one of the marginalized citizens of his or her country knows this too.

And here’s the thing. Many of us have already left our religions (for me, that would be Catholicism) because we didn’t love or accept religious ideologies or want to teach our children that women and other designated human beings were unworthy of the most revered positions of leadership, the most honorable acts of respect, and equal seats at the table with God, if such a phenomenon as God exists. We accept the freedom for such religions to exist. But when it comes to America, we do love, support, want to live by, and are willing to defend the fundamental truths of her Constitution and her Declaration of Independence.

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A few days after America’s 2016 election was finally over, I escaped to the woods for a walk in the cold rain and happened upon a pop-up, feel-good arrangement by some fellow citizens promoting The Kindness Rocks Project:

I stopped to admire the heartfelt effort and thought about the ways we human beings try to make ourselves, and others, feel better in a world where hate is so prevalent, misunderstanding is so warped, oppositional heartbeats thunder so persistently inside our aching chests,

and too many of us end up feeling unwelcome and unsupported in our own country.

I picked up the bronze Peace Be With You rock, stuffed it into my pocket, and continued on the trail through the rain and deeper into the cold, empty forest.

The rock grew heavier in my pocket.

I was thinking about my children. My family and friends. Americans I talk to wherever I go. How to shore up my soul and settle it down. How to believe in a promised land when, as a woman, I am one of the publicly shamed citizens of my own country—and the world.

I could walk through a thousand forests and never understand the allure of corruption, deceit, and deliberate cruelty. I suppose my cognitive processing problems are exacerbated by the very act of choosing to go walking through forests—Shared Forests, Preserved Forests, Beloved and Appreciated Forests. Alas, I’m not only a Woman, but I’m also a Flower Child and a goddamned Tree Hugger. Where is my promised land? I pressed the Peace Be With You rock into the disturbed soil at the base of a mighty tree that had been upended by a terrible storm. Maybe someone else would like to admire it.

There are, of course, things we can do to work at restoring Justice and Domestic Tranquility in America. December’s issue of the The Sun Magazine features an interview with Ralph Nader entitled It’s Easier Than We Think. Ralph Nader On How We Can Change Society. Trigger warning: Ralph doesn’t like a lot of America’s popular politicians. Furthermore, activism isn’t about hitting the send button on an electronic device where you’ve recorded your own angry thoughts and feelings.

We can also learn to dance and I recommend the Tango. Perhaps America needs to start establishing tango parlors—special places where the Peace-Be-With-You Groovies can go to get some shelter.

Once, I traveled to Buenos Aires and landed in a tango parlor inside an abandoned warehouse. We were delivered to the venue courtesy of my niece (she was a student in Buenos Aires) and an angry taxi driver who, when we asked him if it was safe for us to visit the tango parlor, hollered: “Nowhere is safe! You shouldn’t even be in this country!” in between shouting obscenities at protesters blocking our route. My niece translated the taxi driver’s warnings to us using her soft and sweet inside voice, which made us feel bold and adventurous.

A gigantic, anatomically-correct sculpture of a human heart hung from the ceiling of the cavernous tango parlor. It appeared to float in the darkness. Not until after midnight did the musicians arrive, and that’s when the city’s tango dancers emerged from their nowheres. As the musicians played and the couples tangoed, the big heart swayed.

The Tango involves unique and intense forms of intimacy between the dancers and the musicians. Its history and development does not include academic or privileged pedigrees. The dance arose from passion—the kind of passion that sets hearts afloat on small boats in vast and uncertain oceans where mean and nasty sea monsters want to eat them up.

I had created a work of art influenced by my excursion to Argentina and the quiet conversations I had with people I met—people who shared stories from their own dark histories of oppression, exile, and return.

The work was a triptych representing fragmented maps, trails, and walls. I used black walnut ink, which I make from Black Walnut trees in my garden. I included text from my journal, written after the night at the tango parlor.

It surprised me to come upon this work of art, recently, while I was searching for something else.

The art spoke to me all over again from a completely new perspective as I sat in the shelter of my own utopia—surrounded by the serenity of my own gardens—as the sea change of a troubling election bore down on my beloved America.

…The light of la luna falls onto the peaks of the Andes Mountains from skies where darkness conceals our embarrassments as we try to slide the tango into our bodies and out of our feet. We are all pressed up against each other, our faces so close we only have to whisper. Some of us stumble. Others escape. Musicians play. More beautiful dancers, everywhere, find a place for their secrets in the dance and the music. They know to keep truth well-hidden under lowered eyelids and safely quiet behind barely parted lips.  Worries are danced away by the pleasure of bodies, alive, leaning in on each other. We want to dance. We need to dance. The music is all we can trust. 

Trails. Walls. One Heart, Blooming.

Artwork by Theresa

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Here is the final paragraph from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Lincoln was just a man. A man so imperfect and so wrong about slavery and African Americans, yet president of the United States of America. He believed these words, though, and became a better man.

Where, oh where! Are the better angels of our nature now?

“I am loathe to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

May the gods bless and restore to America, the better angels of our nature.