Happy birthday to my mother, and my mother’s America

Mom and me, Idaho mountains somewhere in the early ‘80s

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, and tomorrow is the birthday of our nation. When she was alive, I wouldn’t have seen them as connected, but now, after too many years without her, I have to see them so.

She was a ferocious woman, my mother—driven, private, self-contained in a way that could sometimes seem distant, but that far away space always collapsed toward the curiosity and generosity of her kitchen, toward the speed of her razor sharp wit, toward her ability to laugh and laugh until absolutely everyone was in tears and we would all tell stories of whatever that moment was years later in the hopes of grasping again such unabated and breathless joy.

She was alive, my mother, so so alive — and while I doubt ending up in Idaho had ever been part of her plans when she was studying in Vienna and hitchhiking around Europe, the secret wilderness in her was at home there, an essential element of our lives there, and it is what I think about the most when I remember her now — how much she never let us see. She drove and drove and drove all our lives — around Idaho, around Ohio, up and down and back and forth across the country more times than I remember, toward things, away from things, for work, for adventure, for escape, for discovery.

She would draw one sad bunny over and over with us as children to mock what a dreadful artist she was, but she had a degree in music that she never mentioned and played beautifully on the mahogany baby grand piano we hauled all around the country with us. She was a problem-solver, a natural skill that made her a brilliant city planner, a career she found a passion for when she was on the frontlines of civil rights work at the end of the ‘60s — a part of her biography I knew nothing about until after she had died. She had absolutely no tolerance for the religions and social structures that found elegant ways to explain that women were less than men, that any people were less equal than others, that oppression made any kind of sense at all. She taught our childhood dog to growl at the name of a corrupt local legislator that she was always doing battle with at council meetings, laughing uproariously at both the dog and egotistical clown of a man.

She was a tireless advocate for her two daughters, for the communities around her, for governance that made sense and lifted more people. She did all of this quietly and behind the scenes, knowing exactly how important the results were, and I think assuming like too many women that someday there would be acknowledgment for what she had accomplished from the preeners and grandstanders whose careers benefitted from her work. She was disappointed in this until the end, but by then she spent her time back wandering those Idaho mountains that had become our home and watching the politics she had worked against her entire life become ascendant in America.

She died unexpectedly and too soon in that last surreal summer before Covid unmoored everything, when everyone retreated into some kind of mental bunker and just never came back out. I miss her every day but I am ceaselessly glad she did not live to see this America — a feckless America giving up its rights and freedoms for a few more bucks or a shared belief in delusion, because I guess we’re just too tired to believe in anything that involves the duty and responsibility of our absolutely grand and transformative ideals. How could she have lived through this, had she lived. Or would she have been the best of us, forging as always a way ahead.

The polite, wild Americanness of smiles and handshakes and hand-ups that my mother believed in seems so absolutely far away. In its place are cold bunkers of survival, exclusion, every man for himself — open horizons replaced by enclosures that now hem us in. The spaces we live in and view as ours have become smaller, claustrophobic, lonely, whether we perceive this to be the case or not. The walls are higher and harder. We make the effort to look beyond them less often. The people on the other side are not us, are strangers, and the times when we had to imagine that they can harm us with their breath and touch and mere existence left deep scars on too many of us that we refuse to acknowledge. In that time of crisis we were led by the wrong people who had not an ounce of humanity in the gaping maw of their non-hearts, and that terrible nothingness echoed back into us. There is no one, only you, be your own sheriff and teacher and priest and fool and doctor. Only you. Only you. Be your own.

We learned to expect nothing from our government and nothing from anyone and then nothing from ourselves, and now we are adrift in a needless dystopia. Everything became more selfish, but we decided to think of it as survival, because that justified all the moral failings of believing those around you are just taking things from you, maybe they are dangerous, instead of YOUR PEOPLE and community who you have a duty to know and a responsibility to live with and a lot more in common with than you could ever know.

So when this current American president, a selfish and withered man himself, came again with this message of selfishness as some supreme American ideal, the deep wisdom of fake success, it found a more receptive audience far beyond the tech bros and venture capitalists and “alt” whatever men. You only have to care about you and what you can take from others, he said, and even more people voted for him than before. This is shame on us all, deep national shame, that we elevate a man who is cruel and small and mean to a position where he can pollute us all with these anti-values. He takes and takes and takes from us, takes our rights and wealth and voice and ideals, and we watch like it’s a show about other people and we turn away to tend our smaller and smaller lives.

We decided that selfishness was survival, I guess, and that living in the end times was better than being forever at the leading edge of something new, of something breaking, of something amazing.

We didn’t want to be amazed or amazing anymore. We just wanted to be comfortable with all the stuff that was ours and all the other stuff we imagined should be ours, and we were focused so much downward into this crippling smallness that all the supposedly great men told us we should aspire to that we have missed it, we have missed it all, we have missed what they are doing and what they are taking and the devastation they leave behind on our societies and values and the natural world around us. They hope the selfishness is addictive enough that we fight over scraps and nonsense and that we will miss it, and we are about to miss everything that is left to come.

We used to be the nation of the forever frontier and the impossibly big sky, and now we just look down and look away and look ashamed.

Outside the big American bunker, the behemoth now stripped of its soft power and idealism by blind fools, people die because of our actions. We pretend it isn’t us, it’s them, but the point is it is us together or there is nothing for any of us anyway, so we own it, will own it, will pay. Maybe none of our leaders ever explained to us how we, the American people, helped save the lives of 90 million people by believing, in fact, that all people are created equal, but that we Americans are lucky and blessed to be born in America, and with our bounty we can do good in the world in the hopes that other people will be able to fight for histories that they can be proud of mythologizing, because freedom is infectious, freedom is a wild animal, freedom itself wants to be free and rampage into the hearts of people far and near, and once there, it is our greatest legend, greatest shield, greatest legacy to the world.

They never told us that the Marshall plan was miraculous, that USAID was miraculous, and that these miracles were the work of all of the American people together, who believed we could build a better world by being out in it, and that this made our own lives better at home.

Our leaders never thanked us — but you can be sure they will be happy to pass along the body count of their deliberate and unthinking cruelty, written just there next to our names. For so long we have believed we are the heroes of every story. But we aren’t the Mad Max of our dystopian quest. We’re the people wearing the skins of other people, bathing in the fossil fuels that rent the earth already, waiting to be swept away by the endlessly blowing dust.

My mother was never much for dystopian literature, and I think her preferred vision of the end times involved a quiet swimming pool at the edge of the valley, a wild sunset sky over the dusk blue mountains, and a margarita swirling absently in one hand. No walls anywhere, no need for them, just horizons and winding roads to them. She never liked the smallness of cruel people. Of how they made that smallness into a prison for everyone around them. She thought all of it was stupid and unnecessary. And she did the small work to make big changes for the lives of an astonishing number of people who never even knew who she was.

The last message she ever left for me was about an article she was reading about Putin and the network of goons he was cultivating across Europe and how it was clear Donald Trump wanted to be the king of that club — a goal his current Secretary of State is working hard to make real and now putting American taxpayer money behind. I’m sorry, she said, I just don’t get it. What makes Putin so powerful, what is he offering, he’s just the tyrant of a 5th rate country. So what is going on here? What makes him so attractive — and why are they all so attracted to each other?

She knew, of course, exactly what it was. The network effects of mediocre tyrants are as powerful of those of uncertain modern democracies — ones where individuals had forgotten they have the duty, power, and responsibility to act not only for themselves, but for others. The great power of America was the belief of individuals. Individuals making choices to make our ideals reality.

I don’t know if she could have survived two more elections with Donald Trump — especially not when one returned him to the office he had so disgraced and abused.

Leave aside that you could not shape a better Manchurian candidate than the current president. Who has put the entire nation in the hands of corrupt private enterprise that sees no moral difference between Russians and Americans. Who has nuked American soft power, decapitated the military and promoted incompetents, militarized the nation so we accept a police state, built an imperial presidency, disrupted the rule of law, dismantled US intelligence via firing thousands of personnel and exposing every US asset in the world through incompetence and purpose. Who has shot the entire American arsenal at bogeymen and ghosts, alienated American allies, accumulated crushing national debt with nothing to show for any of it except self-enrichment for his family and cabinet. Who has overseen the consolidation of the total control of national news and information systems into coercive hands, and ensured the cognitive erosion of all Americans.

Donald Trump has laid America bare before its enemies.

But Donald Trump has made America so fucking small, and mean, and selfish, and pathetic, it almost doesn’t matter.

Too many Americans don’t see it, don’t care, applaud it, revel in the selfishness of the last boom times before the network effects of our willingly conceded empire dissolve and we are left a middling power seeking only transaction with the world but shaping nothing, driving nothing, aspiring to nothing.

What is the power of these guys, my mother asked. And it is only the power to tell lies that occlude the possibility to see truth again.

But we must, America, we must.

Even my mother who died much too soon was alive for a quarter of the life of our entire nation, and for every one of those years she was fighting to make things more right. What is 250 years, really — almost nothing, as Putin likes to point out, in the long dark ark of human history during which the vast majority of people lived unfree. Our national ideas are so new and so strong but also so fragile, and there are two things before us then.

That imperial presidents like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump can aspire to make the ideals that America was founded on mean nothing and they can convince you that believing that is wisdom — but far better to use your own eyes and hearts and not let the smallness eat at you until you are the ant they need you to be.

And that much can be saved by one person, one family, one community when we decide to give a damn, and believe others will, as well. Salvation is in small acts, acts which make the bravery of many more possible. My mother always believed this. At her most discouraged, she always lived that life. At her most frustrated, she believed that people can be shown goodness is in their self-interest. At her most enraged, she still moved forward. She tried to give me and my sister the tools to see the despair but navigate with our action. There’s no other way. She would hate the stagnation that dominates now American life.

Happy birthday to my mother, at that pool in the sky, and happy birthday to my mother’s America — a flawed place full of possibility and inspiration, a place where better lives can be achieved through common sense, a place where we give a damn even when there is a cost to ourselves because we can, because we are more, because we are the horizon and not eating rations in a bunker, counting the days until our smallness is a death sentence.

America, we know our history, we know our story, we know how miraculous, and amazing, and surreal so much of it has been. The truth of us, always, is we are flawed, and we fix it, and in each repair, we discover we are more than we have ever been before. And we are proud that we can do this ourselves, because of those ideals laid down on paper lo these 250 long and short years ago.

We know, we know, we know. Happy birthday, America. America is us. Make those wishes count. And maybe pour one out for my mom, she could use it.

— MM