My worst car wreck was on September 14th, 2001.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s one of those memories I can replay with exquisite detail: the sound of the crash, my head bouncing off of the door post, the crunch as my front wheels literally broke off the axles.\u00a0\u00a0It was absolutely my fault.\u00a0\u00a0I pulled out of a driveway onto busy State Route 16 on a Friday night at 5:45 pm, the height of rush hour.\u00a0\u00a0I looked left, saw nothing, then looked right and saw my opening to turn left across the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I pulled out, I glanced left once more. There wasn\u2019t even time to say the proverbial, \u201cOh Shit\u201d, before the car hit my driver\u2019s side door. They were going about fifty or so, lucky for me in a compact car. I was in my \u201cnew to me\u201d blue GMC Suburban, a veritable tank. Anything smaller, and I would have been seriously injured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the accident, I got out the passenger side door and found myself standing in a pile of beer cans. They weren\u2019t mine \u2013 maybe the other driver\u2019s? I wasn\u2019t sure, I was more worried about him and his family. He was relatively unhurt, burned by the airbags on the insides of his arms. His wife was bruised on her face. Their young child, standing up in the backseat, was thrown at the dash. He had a split lip that would require stitches, but seemed OK besides that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We stopped traffic on Broad Street at rush hour on a Friday night.\u00a0\u00a0 Not surprisingly, a crowd soon gathered, and eventually the local police arrived.\u00a0\u00a0I told them everything I remembered, looking at but not seeing the on-coming vehicle, then pulling out in front of him.\u00a0\u00a0And I made sure the officer understood that the accident was totally my fault, that the other driver did nothing wrong.\u00a0\u00a0I distinctly remember hearing a spectator in the crowd:\u00a0\u00a0\u201c\u2026That\u2019s the most honest thing I\u2019ve ever heard\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe it was his beer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They took the kid in an ambulance with his parents.\u00a0\u00a0I was living alone at the time and when they asked if I wanted to get checked out at the hospital, I said that I would.\u00a0\u00a0The world was still ringing, I wasn\u2019t sure how banged up my head was.\u00a0\u00a0But the worst injury was still to come.\u00a0\u00a0Working in the ambulance were some of my former high school students.\u00a0\u00a0They said they needed practice putting in IV\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0So I got a few, and the next day had the dark bruises to show for it.\u00a0\u00a0 After that, my memory isn’t so clear. The other thing I distinctly recall was telling the ER Doctor that I wanted a blood alcohol test.\u00a0\u00a0He said, \u201cYou\u2019re not drunk\u201d, and I replied \u201cI know, but I want that on record\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0I was still thinking of all those beer cans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was my forty-fifth birthday, and it was three days after 9-11.\u00a0\u00a0Looking back, the toll of that week:\u00a0\u00a0learning and teaching about the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the melting point of steel beams, and helping my students through the trauma of airplanes striking buildings, definitely impacted me.\u00a0\u00a0I was mentally exhausted by the end of the week. Maybe that\u2019s why I didn\u2019t see the car coming.\u00a0\u00a0And I was distracted, getting birthday wishes from my parents on the phone at the time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been writing about my experiences, politics, and our world for the past five years.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And I\u2019m starting to wonder; has the cumulative effect of the shock of a nation where nearly half of the voters are willing to support a candidate like Donald Trump caused that same kind of mental distraction?\u00a0\u00a0Add the very real trauma of the Insurrection, of seeing the attack on the Capitol and the Nation, and I find I\u2019m struggling with tolerance.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ve looked back at my writings for the past few weeks and I\u2019m worried. Have I become inflexible?\u00a0For a man who prides himself as seeing all the grays between black and white, my vision and attitude are polarized.\u00a0\u00a0I feel a crash coming on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Donald Trump, and those who support him, were willing to overthrow the Constitution to achieve their individual power and money.\u00a0\u00a0They, all of them, are at a point beyond forgiveness, or to put it in religious terms, beyond redemption.\u00a0\u00a0I envision them as the same as those leaders of the secession movement before the Civil War, Edmund Ruffin or Howell Cobb.\u00a0\u00a0Ruffin, who wrote essays advocating slavery, demanded that the South secede and fired one of the first shots against Fort Sumter.\u00a0\u00a0Cobb, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of Treasury, led the Secession Congress and became a Major General in the Confederate Army.\u00a0\u00a0For both of them, there should be no redemption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ruffin determined his own fate at the end of the war by committing suicide.\u00a0\u00a0But Cobb, and many others, were redeemed.\u00a0\u00a0After the War Cobb received a pardon.\u00a0\u00a0He was even eligible to run for Congress again, though he didn\u2019t (others did, like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens).\u00a0\u00a0But Cobb became a strong opponent of Reconstruction, speaking all across the South, even as one of those who caused the need for Reconstruction in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And for those leaders of the Trump Administration, who plotted at the White House and in a nearby room of the Willard Hotel to thwart the US Constitution and the will of the people; today there is not only redemption, but vindication.\u00a0\u00a0They continue to plan their return to power.\u00a0\u00a0And those that enabled their treachery remain empowered in Congress, and by right-wing media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am struggling to find the gray.\u00a0\u00a0I can understand some of my friends who went to Washington to \u201cStop the Steal\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0They were misled; told by their trusted leaders that the \u201cRevolution\u201d was against them. But that leadership knew better.\u00a0\u00a0And we are getting clearer information about what went on. We know that the crowd was aimed and fired at the Capitol, and violence was a foreseeable and even desired outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it\u2019s hard to look at Josh Mandel here in Ohio, or other Republican candidates throughout the nation who have \u201ccommitted to Trumpism\u201d, as legitimate seekers of office, rather than usurpers of the Constitution.\u00a0\u00a0I can find no \u201cgray\u201d in that.\u00a0\u00a0They allowed Trumpism to \u201chappen\u201d, and they have neither asked for or received absolution for the trauma our nation is still going through.\u00a0\u00a0They are like Cobb and Ruffin, unreconstructed. How can they possibly be allowed to run?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the second issue I\u2019m struggling with is those who refuse to get the Covid vaccine.\u00a0\u00a0They don\u2019t ignore the science \u2013 they deny it.\u00a0\u00a0And they base their decision on their own set of \u201calternative facts\u201d (at least Kelly-Ann Conway had the courtesy to disappear). It’s being fed\u00a0\u00a0to them through pod-casts and the \u201calternate\u201d media.\u00a0\u00a0When confronted with the \u201creal\u201d data, they deny-deny-deny.\u00a0\u00a0It becomes all about a giant world \u201cplot\u201d to enrich big Pharma and the government.\u00a0\u00a0Need an example? Check out Covid infected Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers, following the medical protocol of that known “viral specialist”, podcaster Joe Rogan. It’s disappointing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it\u2019s maddening \u2013 that normally reasonable people, capable of high levels of research and thought, are choosing information sources so poorly.\u00a0\u00a0But they demand that I respect their choices as \u201cvalid\u201d:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou do you, I\u2019ll do me\u201d.\u00a0 The problem is, “you doing you” is hurting the rest of us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank goodness my parents didn\u2019t think that way. As polio, infantile paralysis, was burning through children in the suburbs in the 1950\u2019s, two vaccines were developed to stop its spread. The first, by Dr. Salk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was an injection. The second, by Dr. Sabin who lived down the street from us in Cincinnati, was oral. Both prevented the disease and removed the specter of iron braces and iron lungs that made parents lock their children inside throughout the summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mom and Dad took us to Dr. Sabin\u2019s house.\u00a0\u00a0He served the vaccine out his back patio door.\u00a0\u00a0I suppose we were test subjects \u2013 but my parents, like many, were so worried about polio they would do almost anything to prevent it.\u00a0\u00a0There were mistakes, including a bad batch of Dr. Salk\u2019s vaccine.\u00a0\u00a0But there wasn\u2019t a \u201cmovement\u201d, an anti-polio vaccine effort.\u00a0\u00a0The disease was so much worse than the possibility of mistakes, people accepted the risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But today many are somehow willing to accept as inevitable a disease that has killed three-quarters of a million of us.\u00a0\u00a0And the argument that their infection, while it might be mild, put others at serious and maybe even fatal risk, doesn\u2019t seem to matter.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s hard to \u201ckeep my head\u201d in those discussions.\u00a0\u00a0Hard to accept their ideas even for the purpose of dialog.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s hard not to lose my temper, and say exactly what I think \u2013 they are being played for someone else\u2019s benefit.\u00a0\u00a0And that their decisions might impact and kill others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There Is a friend of mine who worked with the toughest kind of emotionally disturbed children. She often quoted the \u201cSerenity Prayer\u201d: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGod grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not a prayerful man, and I am struggling to determine what I can and cannot change.\u00a0\u00a0There\u2019s not much likelihood of serenity in my head anytime soon.\u00a0\u00a0But I do need to find the capacity to see \u201cthe gray\u201d once again.\u00a0\u00a0It may not lead to serenity, but it might allow me,\u00a0\u00a0\u201c\u2026To keep my head about me, when all others are losing theirs\u201d (Kipling<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0In our current political world, that might be as close to \u201cgrace\u201d as we can get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"