Vicki Chalmers sat on her settee looking out at the cardinals perched on the bare branches of the sycamore tree on her front lawn. Donald Trump had committed yet another crime against humanity and laughed it off as though it were nothing. Wherever she looked his morally bereft, intellectually corrupt, and politically abhorrent intentions were wreaking havoc on the American body politic and the international community.
He sided with fascist Israel in the extermination of the Palestinian people. He destroyed Iran's nuclear program designed for peace and provision. Jewish warmongering and Zionist hatred were the only reasons behind the attack; and now that Zionist terrorists are sponsoring and fomenting violent protests in the streets of Iran, he pledges to send missiles to rain hell and destruction on the only country devoted to promote profound religious values and to rid the world of Jewish tyranny.
He illegally and immorally captured and arrested the duly elected president of Venezuela on phony charges and hauled the man in front of a tampered, corrupt New York court sure to convict him and sentence him to life in a Salvadoran gulag.
He tramples on the rights of brown and black people immigrating to the United States only to feed their families, to work hard and live responsibly. His SS storm troopers repeat Kristallnacht day after day, breaking into homes and workplaces in violent pogroms. ICE, the American Gestapo, is an unholy extension of the arrogance of the President - brutal, incontinent, and murderous.
The black man, the gay woman, the transgender are on the run, fearful for their lives and certain that they too will be deported or at best interned in the Pine Ridge Indian reservation - the poorest, most remote, most hopeless community in America, there to suffer with their red brothers for life.
Global warming is accelerating as he opens vast lands to oil and gas exploration, frees private companies to build polluting refineries, lessens restrictions on carbon emissions, encourages power plants to return to coal, assures another Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with his aggressive support of nuclear energy.
The cardinals in the sycamore pecked at the birdfeeder Vicki had placed on a sturdy branch away from the squirrels, happy as can be finding so much food in the dead of winter. So simple, Vicki thought. So perfectly attuned to the rhythms of nature without complications, complex choices, conundrums, and moral dilemmas; and here she was in a quandary, immobilized by the choices she faced.
Harrison Buckner (aka Hermione Buckner) was a transgender professor at the college where Vicki taught. The administration had overwhelmingly approved his appointment although his academic credentials were sketchy. Harrison, a woman who had transitioned to male would be an example of the feminine in every man.
The faculty committee got more than it bargained for. Harry Buckner went whole hog on the male thing, and transformed her/himself into a swaggering, foulmouthed, crotch-grabbing caricature. Hermione had been completely fed up with female culture - the bitchiness, the seditious sexual allure, the faux glamour and deceit - and wanted to be the ur-male, the truck driver, the hod carrier, the iron worker, the trainman, the macho stud. He was so successful in his transformation that no one except the faculty committee would have ever guessed that he was a woman.
Vicki, a friend of the dean, had inside information about the selection process, knew about Harrison, and went out of her way to befriend him. But the pride she had in the university's welcoming of a person of alternative sexuality disappeared when she invited him out for a drink. This hawking, farting, chain-smoking bully - transitioned woman though she might be - was disgusting. Worse, he was the very image of the type of man against whom she and her feminist sisters had fought for years.
This is what she meant by dilemma - transgenderism was ipso facto good; but its incarnations could be off the charts. Did this mean that transgenderism was not exactly the cure for retrograde heterosexuality that she had thought? She preferred the other way around - sensitive gay men turned frilly girly girls, all swish and perfume, a caricature to be sure but an innocent, engaging one.
The same was true for Ahmed bin-Ali, Palestinian, resistance fighter, former Hamas operative invited by the university to expose the student body to the reality of their cause. He would be the leader of the campus protests to rid Palestine of the Jew.
But bin-Ali was a wife-beating, misogynist, bloody-minded Allah-worshipping zealot whose first goal was to kill the Jew, but second to return women to their God-inspired role of marital whore. Once Hamas restored Gaza, he would return home to recreate an Iranian-inspired theocracy where women were in burqas, locked safely away in windowless chambers, and did men's bidding when demanded.
Yes, the Quran had its troubling verses about the inferior, subjugated status of women, and many suras were bloody-minded at best and downright genocidal at worst; but it was the right of brown people to decide what and whom to believe. In principle, the Palestinian cause, however knotted with inconsistencies, was a righteous one.
However, Vicki could simply not stand this rancid, goat-smelling man whose commitment to the cause might be admirable, but everything else about him stank to high heaven. If he was what Vicki was protesting for, she wanted no part of it.
Environmentalism, she thought, could be her place to make a difference. There would be no tricky sexual dynamics to negotiate, nor transversals, no doubts, no noisy interference. Man's influence on climate change was a given, and the fight to restore environmental sanity was simple.
Yet, the environmental crowd was the most ugly, unsightly, ragged bunch she could ever imagine. These women had found some kind of personal solace in community but had no idea whatsoever what the issue was all about. They were as bad as the doomsday preachers on Union Square warning of the coming of the end of the world in a fiery Armageddon. These women did not talk of God's incineration of mankind, but man's ignorant, senseless projection into a burning, overheated world.
Vicki put on her coat and went outside to fill the birdfeeder. There on the front lawn was the array of signs posted to incentivize her politically sedentary neighbors. 'Black Lives Matter...Hate Has No Home Here...Democracy Matters...Refugees Are People...' and many more. In fact there was little room for her petunias, violets, and lilies of the valley she had planted last year.
This political inclusivity was all well and good, but there were only so many hours in the day, and she had better choose her battles rather than run herself ragged.
Why not Jose, the leaf-blower, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador she had hired? Her home was his sanctuary, and she would do anything for him; but his performance was erratic, and attendance desultory. He mowed without discipline, blew leaves and grass helter-skelter, and was drunk half the time. Honorable immigrant guest though he might be, he was a low-shelf misery.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow described the Approach-Approach Syndrome according to which many people faced with two or more desirable choices cannot make up their minds among them. They are paralyzed by indecision.
Vicki felt trapped in Maslow's syndrome. She wanted to act, to act responsibly, and to do good, but could not decide which path to take. The paralysis was made worse by the unpleasant experiences she had had. In fact she felt herself falling into the other Maslow syndrome - the Avoidance-Avoidance one. All the progressive angles she had explored turned out either distasteful or extremely unpleasant; so it was the perfect storm, trapped as she was within two defining syndromes.
This was a good thing, mused her one and only conservative friend, a girl she had known in college and despite her solid Republican credentials, maintained a close relationship. One less progressive hysteric to worry about, said the friend.
Political paralysis was a blessing in disguise, for once Vicki got over the sleepless nights and daytime nightmares, she found herself edging into a new life. What began as doodling turned into a hobby, then a pastime, then an avocation. Her watercolors of trees and flowers were always popular, happy anodynes as they were to the troubled world outside her studio, and soon she forgot her dilemma. She remained faithful to the canon, and never shied away from professing her progressive faith, but she was no longer obsessed.
As the years wore on she forgot even that, retired to Florida, and either because of senility or resolution, was a totally untroubled old lady.
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