Waking Up To The End Of The World - A Worrier's Happy Life In A Movement Of Fear, A Political Saga

Maeve Barkley woke up early, for today was the day she was to get her COVID booster.  She had thought to bundle it - why not get a multiple dose of protection and be done with it? to be protected against everything and not have to worry - but she had been dissuaded by her doctor and told to wait for her flu, tetanus, shingles and pneumonia boosters. 

Thank God there were these vaccines out there, and damn the anti-vaxxers who denied them. What would the world be like without vaccines against TB and polio? Yet, and even now there are women who have chickenpox parties where children share blankies and PJ's in order to get the disease! Far worse are those mothers who are convinced that the measles vaccine causes every kind of natural disaster and refuse to have their children immunized. 

Maeve had suffered great emotional trauma during the pre-vaccine COVID epidemic years.  She scrubbed her counters with industrial strength lye and chemical disinfectant, installed air purifiers in every room, left mail and Amazon packages outside for three days after delivery, triple masked when she went out (which was almost never), and kept double the six-foot recommended social distance

She became a neighborhood vigilante and rallied others to join in a campaign to call out those who walked unmasked or too close to others.  She helped organize a children's brigade which would be deployed a la Stasi and Sevak to find and report those who disobeyed the rules. 

Maeve had been a skittish, fearful child, always worried about the weather, the scab on her knee, the nuns at St. Agnes, Mr. Allworth, the math teacher, and the woods behind her house.  She hesitated to play outdoors because of the unknown, dreaded walking through the school door, feared breaking a bone on the athletic field, feared God and his retribution for her sins which were building up faster than she could confess them, and knew for sure that she would be the first to catch whatever disease was circulating through New Brighton. 

'Perhaps she should see someone', said her mother, concerned that her daughter was becoming a neurotic mess - and she knew what that was like, still wobbly and uncertain after years of therapy and a pharmacopeia of anti-anxiety medications; but her husband dismissed the idea.  'A phase', he said. 'All children go through it, granted not with so many odd bits as Maeve, but still'; and so they decided to let things ride and see what happened. 

The phase did pass thanks to the bitchy, catty girls in her class who were merciless in their taunts, imitations, whispers, and rumors; but the foundational nature of her worries - some tightly-wound strand of DNA inherited from someone or other in her family past - was there to stay. 

However, she found a congenial, supportive, and healthy outlet for her worries, and was welcomed into the many campus organizations concerned about the plight of the black man, the warming climate, war, capitalist greed, and much more.  Her colleagues found her a most eager, responsive, and ambitious member of the group.  

She was first at the barricades, first in the phalanx marching against the police, loud and clear on the podium, and a tireless recruiter of students. 

After college and graduate school and a doctoral dissertation that was excerpted by the liberal press, Racism From Plymouth Rock To Chicago - The American Pandemic, she joined one of the premier progressive lobby groups in Washington, Scientists for Social Responsibility, and there became known as The Amazon of K Street - a fierce, tireless, club-wielding harridan for whom the evisceration of the enemy was worthy of the Comanche warriors who left the entrails and dismembered bodies of white settlers for Union soldiers to find. 

This energetic pursuit of social justice calmed her nerves - there was nothing to worry about if you were doing something about it.  She had always feared the black man.  As a child she thought of him as a weird, ghoulish, misshapen monster who lived underground like the Morlocks in The Time Machine. Although she never admitted it, her efforts to reform the ghetto were more to keep the black man in his place and not threaten her. 

 

Working for the health of the planet kept her from considering a fiery end of the world which was inevitable unless mankind rallied.  Fighting for the destruction of Wall Street allayed her fears about becoming destitute, homeless, and living on the street. 

Progressivism is, after all, a movement of worry. Progressives worry that the sky is falling, that doom is just around the corner, that horrible new viruses will escape from Chinese labs or Congolese forests and infect the world, that military adventurism will finally disassemble the architecture of peace and condemn the world to perpetual violence, that minorities will be rounded up like cattle, interned in some South Dakota gulag and summarily executed. 

Although progressives claim they are dedicated to progress and the verdant, peaceful, kind, and considerate Utopia of the future, they want nothing of the kind.  They love living in a miasma of fear, in an environment of death and destruction. 

Which is why Maeve found a home there.  It was a very congenial place with camaraderie, fellowship, and community.  They all hated and feared together, shared stories of pillage and desperation, theories of conservative insurrection, rumors of coups, military takeover, unholy alliances with vicious dictators; and at the end of the day walked out the door happy, confirmed, and satisfied. 

Causes are far more engaging that stoicism or Darwinian theory - the essence of American conservatives who believe that there is no such thing as progress, only change caused by the perennial struggle between the weak and the strong.  Acceptance of this certitude provides both the political and emotional reserve necessary to survive and prosper.  

 

No one on the National Mall demonstrating for climate action really cares about a few degrees of change.  Warmer winters would actually be nice; but the cavalcade, the jamboree, the whole sold-out rock concert of purpose and joy is why they are there. Living in a que sera, sera world would be cold and empty. Protest confers identity, and joint protest - political camaraderie - cannot be matched for a truly human experience, one which conservatives can never know. 

COVID took Maeve by surprise.  Suddenly fear and loathing took a very personal form.  She was no longer in the progressive camp of universal hate, but in her own childhood cocoon.  All the years of political expression which had tamped down and quieted her natural tendency to worry suddenly disappeared into the distant past.  They held no salience, no anodyne to the real, horrifying fear of suffocating in a hospital bed, gasping for her last breath as COVID took another victim. 

When it was over, she gave a sigh of relief and turned once again to political activism.  Donald Trump was in office, and the elision from personal fear to universal fear was smooth.  All her juices began running clear. She felt good in the morning, ready to meet the day.  There was so much wrong with the world and Trump was making it worse. 

'Worries can be happiness' wrote a well-known social psychologist. 'No one is happier, more joyful, more full of life than the person who lives in a world of doom, death, and destruction, and who feels he is doing something about it'. 

Synchronicity In Marriage - Fidelity, Love, Respect, Sharing Until The Clocks Are Set Back

Brent Fielding hated changing the clocks every Spring and Fall.  The new thermostat required a password and two-step security, the stove he had bought for the kitchen remodeling required almost as much, and the wall clock which never kept good time in the first place, required a step ladder to reach.  Resetting the clock on his new car was cloaked in mystery, hidden in a maze, and the missing piece of a thousand-piece puzzle. 

 

Yet it was at these two times of year that he reassessed his marriage - the resetting, the strange changes in light and shadow, the disassociated feeling, all were signifiers, indicators.  

Brent and his wife Barbery had been married for forty years. Their marriage had survived infidelities, family disputes, and the usual gamut of slights, willfulness, and indifference. They loved each other or at least knew that they would be adrift if one of them died. They had settled into a comfortable routine like most older married couples, but their relationship was a very active one within it.  They never tired of each other, and when one of them had gone out to a class or a meeting, the other felt an emptiness in the house.

As Brent grew older, more and more he began to notice patterns and outlines where before he saw substance.  He noticed how perfectly he and his wife could anticipate their movements so that they never got in each other’s way.  

Not in the small kitchen, nor in the narrow hallway, nor in and out the doors.  He could trace their flows and if he had drawn them, there would have been no straight lines; and if he could have animated them, they would have more resembled a choreographed pas de deux than polite leeway.  

He knew from his wife’s first footfall that she was descending the stairs so he waited until she came down before he went up to his office. He understood her morning routine of coffee, yoghurt, New York Times so well, that never once did it ever interfere with his tea, texts, or chopping the  celery for soup.  They moved through the kitchen with practiced movements, but not not without grace.

The substance of things seemed to matter less than their outlines and their forms.  He noticed how pictures were framed, how the rooms of the house were arranged and built.  He noticed angles and shadows, the lines of phone and light cords, the silhouettes of trees and the shape of phones and sinks.

Brent found that once he started to be aware of his obsession with shape, form, and outline, he could not stop himself from seeing only the thumb hole in the scissors, the composition of the Giotto fresco, the repeating circles of clock, trivet, and ashtray; the disappearing lines of phone cords; the delineation of dried berry stems.  His office was no longer one of color, memories, and texture; but only outlines.

At the same time he came to appreciate his life with his wife more than he ever had. This focus on intersecting patterns or balletic approach gave it new meaning.  If he could emotionally prosper in a routine without substance but only outline, then the relationship was indeed an important one without which he could not survive.

Marriage had always been a matter of synchronicity, a balletic dance, an intimacy born of appreciation of the subtlety of paired movement that only matures after many years of dancing.  Now that elision had become routine - there were no new patterns, unusual pirouettes or steps, and if there had been, he would have been concerned.  

In his younger years such disruptions in synchronicity might have meant a lover, a tryst, a new emotional algorithm which he did not understand.  Now interruptions in the perfect choreography might mean the onset of dementia, or a final release of age-old, well-hidden frustrations. 

Now it wasn't so much changing patterns, but adjustments to time, and the resetting of the clocks which heralded them.  Neither one had talked about the disappearance of patterns, the eventual solitary life that one of them would have to lead, a life without Swan Lake, and worse, a life leading to the end of time itself. 

'We all die alone', Tolstoy wrote in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and like Ivan few of us are prepared for the solitude, the fear, the uncertainty, and the final disassociation with everything around us.  No grieving relatives, no solemn prayers of priest or rabbi, no familiar music can allay this terror of the end, the unexperienced future. 

Time is relative said Einstein in his famous disquisitions on matter and energy; but even outside the world of physics we know this.  Old people feel time is rushing by, suddenly it's Sunday again, didn't I just water the plants...While young people feel time moving painfully slowly - dragging hours of anticipation, excitement.  

Which was why the resetting of the clocks made Brent anxious.  He was manipulating time - didn't we get an extra hour of life every Fall?

Of course not, and even if we did, wouldn't that upset God's plan? 

Einstein said that if a spaceship travelled at close to the speed of light time would slow, and that compared to those left behind on earth, passengers would remain young.  Returning to base they would find everyone they knew dead, gone, and buried.  Slowing time meant accelerating it, neither one a good idea. 

A few years ago there was a partial solar eclipse in Washington, and Brent went down to the Georgetown waterfront where there was a clear, unobstructed view of the sky over the Potomac.  When the eclipse was at its zenith - again the sun was only partially obscured - the ambient light changed, the birds stopped singing, the picnickers on the park lawn spoke more quietly, more softly.  The world was at a strange, unaccustomed moment.  Life was always a matter of sunup, sundown at regular, predictable times and this threw that all off.  It was unsettling. 

The eclipse stayed with him for days, and he remembered it especially at the resetting of the clocks.  Both were small, unusual interruptions in familiar patterns and as such could not be ignored. 

At both events, his life of physical patterns - the pas de deux, the intersecting lines, the shadows that we make that come and go - and his timely routine were upset.  He could only think of place without both.  No patterns, no time. 

'I love you', he said to his wife, very unusual for him a very undemonstrative person, but fitting somehow at this particular moment. 

So far, so good. Mens sana in corpore sano but for how much longer?  Suddenly that didn't matter now that he had put fractals, shadows, lines and clocks away. 

Playing The Cards You're Dealt - Unforgiving Nature, The Tale Of Parents Whose Children Are Not Up To Snuff

Maeve Bradley had prepared the baby's room months before the due date.  There were stuffed animals, mobiles, soft lighting, a pastel color scheme, fanciful throw-rug, and a teddy bear.  She and her husband chose not to know the sex of the baby - that was God's doing - but like all parents hoped that he or she would be happy and healthy. 

To begin with at least, for Maeve believed that with the genes in the family, their child would be one of a kind, blessed from birth with the one-in-a-million genetic package that would be the foundation for greatness. 

Presumption, of course, unless you knew Maeve Bradley, an obsessive woman whose genealogical investigations were as thorough as that of a Harvard academic.  She studied the original texts of Mendel, studied his family trees, learned stochastics and the probabilities of outcome - when to predict blue eyes when brown were dominant, what were the genetic determinants of height, pigmentation, and agility. 

Her father had been at Yale when the infamous body-type research project had taken place.  A German geneticist had convinced the dean of the psychology department to allow him access to the nude photos of all incoming freshmen taken to determine aberrations in posture - scoliosis and other spinal irregularities. Why Yale thought this was important is beside the point. It was Werner Smoltz' contention that body type - mesomorph, ectomorph, and endomorph - was a predictor of intellectual ability. 

The mesomorphs, closest to our simian ancestors, were expected to do poorly, while the ectomorphs were considered the ideal for high-level performance. Smoltz was influenced by the Belgian colonists in Rwanda who had unscientifically determined that the tall, well-muscled, physically attractive Tutsis should be favored over the monkey-like Hutus and given positions of responsibility. 

Smoltz's research was dismissed by Yale in the wave early wokeness - body-type analysis was racist and socially irresponsible - but there were a number of academics who quietly pursued Smoltz' idea. These mesomorphic apes milling about in student lounges couldn't possibly be bright enough to tie their shoes. 

In her intent to build a genetic profile for her soon-to-be-born child, Maeve overlooked nothing, even the discredited theories of Smoltz.  She even dabbled in phrenology - the Nineteenth Century theory that head size and shape determined intelligence. 

After much assiduous investigation, Maeve built the expected genetic profile of her future child, and was convinced that he would inherit the high intelligence of two remote great uncles, one on each side of the family, who had excelled in theoretical mathematics and physics. This direct genetic link was freshened by two female ancestors who, although not as famous as Madame Curie, were well-known in the scientific community as geniuses.

 

As soon as the baby was born Maeve looked for signs of high intelligence.  MIT Press had a complete series of academic works on child development, genetic trait predictors, and signs of precocity, and Maeve matched them with her baby's smiles, looks, and movements. 

She first noticed something awry in the young toddler's playgroup.  While the other children played engagingly with the pots, pans, spoons, and cups - filling them with water, emptying them, stirring them, etc.- Maeve's boy Roland just sat there, a bit wobbly, goofy looking and disengaged. 

Disengagement is often a sign of early perceptive cognition, the MIT tomes suggested; but there was something too disconnected about the boy to ignore.

So she bought a range of toys meant to challenge the growing intellect of toddlers, facilitating their development into reasoning, analytical adults; but Roland just sucked and fiddled with them, and left them in a pile on the floor. 

Something must be wrong, Maeve reasoned - not with the boy but with the MIT algorithms.  The researchers in Boston must have missed something, or a sample size too small or other inconsistencies.  It simply couldn't be Roland. 

By the time the boy was two there was no doubt that the genetic hand he had been dealt was a bad one, but even then, skilled poker players with bluff, threat, and confidence can at least come out even.  The point was, do all you can to make do with what you've got.  In Roland's case, to squeeze every bit of whatever intelligence he had out in the open.  He might not be at the top of the food chain as she had expected, but given every advantage, he would have a respectable position. 

In all this, Maeve suspended disbelief.  Despite what she saw, she simply could not accept the fact that her son was poorly endowed.  He was as smart as any of his classmates, and she would prove it.  So she wheedled places for him in the accelerated math and reading sections at school.  'Wait and see', she told skeptical teachers who were reluctant to put a slow-thinking boy in with whizzes.  'Consider his self-esteem', they said. 

The boy of course could not keep up, looked dimly at the simplest addition and subtraction problems, and doodled on his worksheet while the other children worked.  

Reading was no different.  He was not dyslexic or learning-disabled, just, well... dumb.  In her mother's generation there was no political correctness and the dumb kids (there was no varnishing reality in those days) were put in special sections.  No one took offense, and these children were as accepted on the playground as any.  There was a bell curve for everything, these children instinctively knew, and because of it, there was no reason to feel superior or arrogant. 

Not so today when advancement, success, and superiority matter.  It was a question of honor that Roland make up distance lost and join the peloton. Which he couldn't do, and which left Maeve feeling frustrated and hopeless. 

Private school would be just the thing, and once again Maeve wangled a slot for him at one of Washington's premier institutions.  The Admissions Office was at first reluctant to take him, but a more than generous donation to the building fund did the trick. 

Not surprisingly, Roland was simply not up to snuff.  Not only that, because the students admitted to the school were Washington's best and brightest, he fell far behind. 

Affirmative action was just beginning in those days, and the school felt obliged to admit under-represented minority students - not just the sons and daughters of the black middle class and children of African diplomats, but children from the worst inner city neighborhoods. These children were basically given a free ride.  Just being in the school and exposing white children to diversity was enough. 

Roland was not even up to the meagre performance of these students, and he was teased, intimidated, and harassed simply for being white.  The school had no choice but to tell Maeve that her son was not the right fit for their academic program. 

Somehow the boy got through public high school - Washington high schools were used to having low-performing students, and he was quite comfortable there.  Little was asked of him, and he was praised for whatever he was able to produce. 

But his mother, after all these years still convinced that some spark of real intelligence if not genius resided in the boy, looked at colleges for him. By now Maeve knew that Harvard and Yale were not in the cards, but any number of competitive state schools would do the trick and Roland was enrolled in a well-known public university. 

To make a long story short, he failed there and at two others.  To his credit, he kept soldiering on when such failure would have taken the sap out of most young people.  

Finally, Maeve gave up. She let him do what he wanted to do, and that was to fix appliances which he took apart and put back together with ease, locating the problem (worn gasket, bent rotor blade), finding the right part, and fixing the thing. 

 

As much as at first it galled her to see her son finagling with blenders and toasters, she had to keep her disappointment under wraps - for the boy's sake; but Roland thrived, got a job at an Ace Hardware store that offered a repair service for small motors - blowers, lawn mowers, etc. - and was considered a whiz.  He could get old rusted motors clogged with grease chugging away after only an hour. 

The repair shop was good for Maeve.  Not that she went about boasting to her friends about Roland and his genius with Toro mowers, but that she became less obsessive about everything.  It had taken Roland and twenty-five years of frustrated expectations, but she could finally sit in a chaise lounge in the back yard and relax. 

Roland, finally released from his mother's clutches did well, made a good living, married the right girl, moved to a split-level in Gaithersburg, and lived happily ever after. 

'I wonder what nasty bits I got from Uncle Harry?', said Maeve.