Vicki Chalmers woke up one morning and wondered how she would get through the day. She lived five miles from the White House but felt miserable and disconsolate under its dark shadow. Every day there was something new and horrific from the Oval Office - Venezuela, ICE, military occupation of Washington, and retrenchment on all the hopeful social, environmental, and economic programs designed to make America a warm, inviting, compassionate, verdant place. One never knew what horrendous, unthinking, and destructive policies would come out of Donald Trump.
She had been a lifelong liberal, a progressive in tune with every note of the canon. She had fought early and long for the black man; had been the first at the barricades for gay rights, had opened her home to asylees from El Salvador, and was a tireless advocate for socialist reform of the brutal, exploitive, ruinous capitalist system of the United States.
Now, she felt overmatched and tired. Donald Trump was a whirling dervish of radical conservatism, eliminating departments of government, bullying international adversaries, shutting the border to well-meaning, hungry refugees, drilling everywhere and despoiling the environment, cutting taxes and eliminating fair market restrictions on the rich, opening a Robber Baron era of unchecked greed.
What was a mother to do?
Vicki dressed slowly and methodically, without her usual bright step forward, a touch of cologne, a bit of dazzle, a colorful dress, and a flip of her hair. It was painful to clothe herself, better to remain naked, she thought, the only pure and simple thing in today's foul and polluted society. Yes, that's what she would be, a Lady Godiva on the Potomac, something glittery and pristine, a show of optimism and heady purpose.
Yet, she demurred and begrudgingly pulled on her underthings, slipped into an old housedress, fed the cat, and sat morosely over a cup of yesterday morning's coffee.
When she did manage to go out, everything reeked of Donald Trump. The price of gas had just dropped to below three dollars for the first time in years. 'Robbing Venezuelan oil' she said. The homeless man at the intersection - Trump's rescinding of every safety net possible. The gas-guzzler traffic on River Road without an EV in sight - Trump's carte blanche for big oil and his cozying up to Wall Street energy investors.
The Latino leaf-blowers and ditch-diggers - Trump's racist agenda and deliberate attempts to force brown people into poverty and back over the border. The heavens above, crowded with Trump-Musk satellites and space ships all designed to create wealth and consolidate interstellar power.
High price of a cup of coffee and no pate on the shelves of Whole Foods - Trump's tariffs. Jobless rolls because of AI - the witchcraft of Musk, Brin, Altman, and Donald Trump designed to eliminate human labor and replace it with profit-making robotics.
If that weren't enough, it was almost mid-January and there had yet to be any appreciable snow in Washington. Trump's climate change denial and his cabal of naysayers and faux scientists turned back all sensible programs to slow the process of global warming.
Yet unconscionably life went on. How could people still be having a good time, flying to the Bahamas, eating at Michelin-starred restaurants, filling downtown bar and bistro happy hours? With the evil residing in the White House, how could anyone sit happily and unconcerned, watching Hollywood romantic series? Buying up unnecessary plastic things, opting for....
Vicki paused for breath, sat down on a park bench, adjusted her dress, and sighed. The feeling of despair, frustration, and anger would not leave her no matter how vernal and beautiful the surroundings. She had been poisoned by the man, infected by his viral arrogance, filled with his hatred of America and Americans.
She began to cry. She tried to stop herself. 'I'm becoming my mother', she said, 'a weak, old woman, men's patsy, a trembling, sobbing non-entity'. Where was recourse? Resolve? Equanimity? If she continued like this she would end up an embittered, shriveled-up old crone before her time. She still had many productive years ahead of her, and here she was sobbing in Lafayette Park to beat the band.
The world began to fracture and disassemble before her eyes. Everything, every living, moving, breathing thing was part of the Trump conspiracy of evil. He and only he had caused poverty, social unrest, the warming climate, income inequality, crime, violence, and unparalleled greed. Life was no longer one, entire, all-encompassing, natural organism. Any sense of worth, cohesion, and amiability was gone. The Trump world was one of shattered glass, detritus, and filth.
She stood up and the pigeons which had gathered around suddenly flew up in a great, windy, noisy flock. She watched them disappear over Pennsylvania and the White House to settle someplace else, perhaps on the lawns beneath the Washington Monument. 'I want to fly with them', Vicki thought.
To call Vicki nuts was true, but conditional. She was not inherently mad, but driven so by Donald Trump. She was an innocent victim of his bullying hatred, a mental refuge needing asylum, a port in a storm, a safe place, an emotional home; but none were to be had. Everything she saw in her field of vision was an expression of Trump's predatory, insensate, distorted vision, and no matter how she tried she couldn't get rid of the awful shakes, worse than a drunk's DT's, those of the Madwoman of Chaillot, or St. Vitus' dancers.
One might have thought that her career, so uniformly and passionately progressive would have given her a foundation of solace. She certainly had done more than her fair share to right the ship, to turn America towards a compassionate, collective, universal future; but that was not enough.
Worst of all, the Trump revolution was a slap in the face. No one on the Left in the halcyon woke years of Joe Biden would have thought this Trump thing possible; and yet, there it was, all white, blonde, young and caring about nothing but themselves. A jamboree of white privilege, ill-gotten gains, and social disdain. If there weren't so many of these pert, beautiful, young women on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, Vicki might have felt better; but this...THIS...was too much to bear and it was then she went off her rocker.
Her daughter managed to get her admitted to the Institute of Living, a private clinic for the mentally ill in Hartford. Everyone there was as crazy as a loon, completely unhinged, and barely controllable, but the facility offered the best possible treatment for those in need. By the time Benita Chalmers had secured a place for her mother, Vicki had gone completely around the bend and thought she was going to St. Bart's for holiday.
She will be there until the money runs out, said Benita and then transferred to DC hellhole, St. Elizabeth's, the modern version of Bedlam; but by then her mother wouldn't know what's what, so she did not feel guilty.
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