Flights of Fancy
Or, what I think about when I run
I don’t exercise to music. Or to podcasts. Or to audiobooks.
I don’t know if that makes me an idiot or a purist. Obstinate or focused. Luddite or Stoic.
I struggle to stay present in the minute-to-minute living of my life, so you’d think I’d welcome a distraction to my exertions. A way to manage the effort, to put distance between the experience of discomfort and my awareness of it.
But I don’t.
Mainly because I don’t think I need it.
I seem to be able to get lost in my own head without any external prompts. I have run for years without them. Conversations are the distractions for me, and if I find myself without a Tony or a Roger or a Tom or a Matt with whom to chat while we run, then I have conversations with myself. Not out loud — that would be weird — but inside my empty head I solve world problems. Or noodle through my Booker Prize acceptance speech. Or, more usually, brainstorm ideas for stories or roleplay a conversation with a daughter or parent or even a partner. (So I like preparation; it improves precision. Sue me.)
Lately I’ve been consumed by thoughts of our world’s voluntary embrace of autocrats. Like Victor Orban and ol’ Vlad Putin. And would-be autocrats, like our disgraced — and disgraceful — former President. I guess his continued presence in our national consciousness indicates how desperate people feel about their ability to control their own futures, but c’mon, folks! What makes you think that this guy has ever cared about anyone but himself? Sure, he’ll cut your federal taxes by $500, but that’s not because he cares one whit about you — it’s so he can cut his own taxes by $5 million. He’s a base, contemptible human being interested only in what can make him a buck.
I won’t list all of his transgressions — Seth Meyer can do it better than anyone — but it seems to me that his calling card is fear, and we know that fear is about two-and-a-half times more motivating than hope. Which makes sense. Long ago, the guy who started running first when the lion showed up in the village is probably the guy who lived.
But our guy is stoking fears with exaggerations and outright lies. I can guarantee that anything you can possibly imagine has happened at least once in the history of the world. Like a guy who put on his wife’s wedding dress, rolled around in pig shit, and then boned a goat. Definitely happened.
But how often?
Not often.
And by the same token, illegal immigrants do commit crimes. But every bit of data shows they follow our laws better than native-born people. And crimes committed by illegal immigrants has stayed the same during the past decade. Which also makes sense, because it takes a lot of time, energy, and expense to get here, and I’m guessing once you’re here you don’t want that effort to go to waste. If you see a dude who’s here illegally from, say, Honduras, and he’s driving an old compact pick-up truck loaded down with landscaping gear, you can bet he’s driving at or slightly below the speed limit and signaling his every turn. He does not want to go back to Honduras.
We’re all people, no matter what we look like. No matter where we’ve lived. We really are all the same in every way that matters, for both good (hard-working, generous, kind) and ill (pettiness, anger, judging).
And I believe we can all agree that we need an immigration policy that allows us to keep bringing in people who fuel our economy while merging with our cultural expectations around our established community.
So my aversion to our former President isn’t about policy (which he doesn’t really have, except to enrich himself and to empower himself so that he can enrich himself even more). It’s because we need leaders committed to rational decision-making and making good-faith efforts with every member of our community to create laws that we feel improves lives for everyone in our community.
Power politics never works in the long term, and it inflicts a lot of pain for everyone involved. There’s a reason that people involved in war — both the “winners” and the “losers” — choose to do everything they can to avoid another one, and that starts with compromises with people they don’t completely agree with. Something our former President has never considered.
I don’t understand how anyone can look at this blustering bully wannabe and think, “Yup, he’s our guy!” But apparently an awful lot of us do.
Maybe they need to run without music . . . .
