2016... Are we done yet?

What with the disastrous result of the election on November 8 and the slow yet inevitable socio-economic collapse in Venezuela, I am feeling rather dark. Two of the three countries I consider my own seem always to be breaking my heart.

My self-imposed news moratorium continues and I am not at all informed of what is going on. I know what is happening in Venezuela because my friends let me know through WhatsApp. I catch a glimpse of a ‘Presidential’ twitter meltdown, of a cabinet placement and I want to cry and look away.  I have no idea what is going on. I am not watching Trevor, Samantha or John, or even the more acerbic Bill.   I am avoiding SNL. I am not clicking on anything.

I saw a picture of the last Christmas card the Obamas will ever send as the First Family. I might have hugged my computer screen sobbing.

I have hidden myself in the silent and mindless joy of craft gift wrapping. I focus on the glitter and the brown paper and twine. Yes, my Christmas tree (named Hedwig this year) fell and broke two of our glass ornaments with mine and DH’s initials which felt somewhat prophetic or something but it’s now up and looking rather pretty.  

To put it mildly 2016 has been an interesting year. I got to fulfill a life-long dream of seeing Orcas in the wild. It is not lost in me how privileged I am to be able to travel unrestrained from one country to the other, stay in a floating home, see the whales, eat and drink and be marry. I returned from that trip back to Florida to the heartbreaking news of the mass shooting at Pulse in Orlando. I became a citizen, excited for the possibility of being part of this country and casting my vote, to find myself the future subject of a president elect who won by a system that makes no sense to the rest of the free world.

While I have never been the upbeat, blindly optimistic, cheery type, I have always ended every year of my life with a silent hope for something better and greater ahead. It was this knowledge of hope which kept me from spiraling into sadness when I spent my first New Year here in the country. Despite all the uncertainty ahead of me that New Years’ Eve 2003 I felt, mingled with the tears and sadness, a sense of wonder for what lay ahead.

I know that when my mom feels like I do, she places herself in the hands of her God and it offers her a blessed comfort. Nothing is in my hands, I place myself in yours. In your infinite wisdom, guide me. And all that.

Not even when I was a practicing Catholic did I have the personality to place myself fully in the hands of a superior power and let the chips fall where they may.

Part of me wishes now, I had the same escape route and solace.

What else is left for me to do than wait? What will 2017 bring? I have many plans for the year. Trips abroad with my best friend, visiting family in June, hopefully buying a house with a pool Zoey can enjoy. But what about the bigger things? The things outside my bubble? The ones I don’t want to care about but do? 

Maybe those I will put in the hands of…someone else. Maybe I will just be like the blind guy in Rogue One and just mutter to myself “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me” And walk into the fire and see what happens.

Why is this happening?

I woke up this morning with a feeling of uncertainty and fear so bottomless, so stark, it’s kind of giving me vertigo. I haven’t felt this level of sheer despair and impotence since I was forced into a plane, with no saying of my own, to come to the United States.

I feel I am having PTSD flashback of that moment, when I refused to cry and the tears and terror were choking my throat and making it hard to breathe. I stared at the back of the seat in front of me with unrelenting focus, knowing that if I blinked, or thought, or spoke, I would break.
 

 In the fourteen years, I’ve lived in this great country I have been called a spic to my face once. I have gotten mean comments on my blog calling me a beaner, but to me internet trolls don’t count. Maybe because of that I never truly believed that Trump would be elected. His vitriolic words, his rampant sexism, his ugly view of all Muslims, his mockery of the disabled was so over the top that I thought, naively, that those feelings were not reflected in the heart of others.

It makes me wonder what feelings people had been hiding when they look at me. Do they wish to say “go back to your country” and knew it was not PC and therefore bit their tongue? Do they feel now that they can do it, since the President Elect of this country so freely does?

I am scared. I am scared because all these years I have felt safe in the knowledge that this country was a shelter for all, I am scared for my mother, whose immigration process has yet to be completed. I am scared for my cousins who are also in the process of legalization. I am afraid for my rights as a woman and what laws that protect me will be the first to be repealed. I am afraid that there are so many, many people who saw all this hate pandering and saw it as inspiring.

Was it silly of me to think we all want to be united, together, as one, no color or race? Have I been listening to too much Imagine by Lennon? Was I burying my head under the sand, ignorant of the rotting core of this country?  It’s not the party I am against. I lived through one Bush administration with no problem. It’s the name calling and the wall-building, and the fear mongering and the seeds of racism and bigotry that are sprouting in the hearts of others.

I am afraid for the state of the relationship with my husband who fails to understand in all his straight white man privilege that HE has nothing to fear, but I DO. The same way he belittles that fear we all woman have of walking in dark alleys because we are conditioned since infancy to fear a predatory attack from a random man. A fear my husband feels is exaggerated and does not understand because empathy is a concept he never grasped. The same way so many other people in this country apparently don’t either.

There is a weight in my soul, not because Hillary didn’t win and we didn’t get our first woman president (which would’ve been awesome), not because Trump won…but because he won the way he did, spouting divisiveness and hatred and racism and bigotry.

Now they say we must rally behind him, but is he going to rally behind us? The people he mocked and threatened? The millions he put down and called rapists, the ones he sees as property to maul and inappropriately touch?

The truth is, he doesn’t scare me, he doesn’t worry me, he isn’t the one breaking my heart. The people who I share this country with, my neighbors, the ones around me who voted for him, those are the ones who scare me, who worry me, who made me feel like I can’t trust because I don’t know what is festering in their heart.

I will try to focus on the 2% difference. The small 2% that cost the election. That is a big number of people, who fight for good and inclusiveness and what is right.

I wonder how long it will take for this feeling to dissipate. I remember what shook me off my stupor when I first got into this country, it was a very small moment, listening to music from back home in a Sears store.  Maybe something equally insignificant will shake off this feeling of dread.

I will go home and hug my cat and my dog who have no idea what is going on and wait for hope to rekindle in my heart…for now, it’s pretty fucking bleak there.

Dream come true

 

I just had my dream vacation. DH and I went to Victoria, BC where we spent hours on a boat witnessing the majestic, breathtaking beauty of Orcas in the wild. I had dreamed of that moment for years and it was with tears in my eyes that I saw them swim towards us, so free and happy, jumping out and talking to each other, free to roam the hundreds of miles a day they cover when they are free.

The day before I could see the whale watching tour arriving every few hours and everyone getting off the boat had a smile in their face, I asked several groups if they saw Orcas and they said “we saw a lot of humpback whales and seals” and they seemed so happy. I wanted to see humpbacks too, but the decision to go to Victoria was based on the fact that they have a resident pod, the J pod. The J pod is part of a bigger clan of the Southern resident killer whales in the area and includes the K and L pods.

The evening before our tour I sat there, looking at the sun setting (at 9:30 pm) and begged the Gods of Whales, Neptune, San Francis of Assisi (patron Saint of animals), and all the powers that be to let me see some Orcas. I had flown almost 3,500 miles (even with my flying phobia) to be able to see them.

We had been warned that the rough weather the last couple of days had the Orcas doing Orca things in hiding and they had not seen one yet. I closed my eyes and just begged the universe for this. We were on the boat for 45 minutes, looking for them when the captain suddenly shuts the engine and says “They are coming towards us, up ahead”.

Sure enough, there they were. I could feel all the hair in my body standing on end (the cold might have something to do with that as well), there is no way to describe the joy in my heart when I saw that tall, shiny black fin cut through the water towards us. Unimpeded by walls, or tanks, just open and cold waters. When one jumped in the air and landed on its side I felt swamped with love and respect for them, so amazingly smart, so beautiful and close to each other. 

I have felt a fascination for Orcas since I saw the movie “Orca, the killer whale” when I was little. The male Orca in the movie wants revenge for the murder of his baby whale who got cut out of his mother by the boat propeller or some such nonsense.  The male Orca lost his baby and his mate who died from the injuries. He pushes his dead mate to the beach and I remember so clearly the sense of grief from the animal in the movie.

Ever since then, even though the whale is supposed to be the bad guy in the horror movie, I have been in love with them. While Seaworld and other parks were available to me, the idea of seeing them in a pool was utterly repellant.  So my dream of watching them in the wild was born.

I could feel my husband looking at the goofy awed looked in my face and waiting for me to burst into tears. It was a close call folks, I was one fin away from ugly crying and let me tell you, there is nothing like wanting to cry from seeing something beautiful, crying from seeing a dream realized, crying because you are surrounded by nature’s almighty power.

At the end of the trip, a group of whale approached us and one flipped belly up, the startling white of its belly shinning so brightly through the water and belly up, as if asking for a petting swam beneath our boat and away.

Among the J pod that we saw is J-2 or “Granny” purported to have been born in 1911, Granny is the oldest Orca in the entire planet. I saw the oldest mother fucking Orca in the world. She is 105 years old and the bad boss of her matriarchal community. We also saw J-22 (Oreo), J-27 (Blackberry), J-34 (Double stuff), J-38 (Cookie). Obviously the scientist have a thing with pastries.

I went back home to Florida, full of happy thoughts about the world. Happy that everyone we had encountered in our trip had such love for nature and our planet and were taking so many steps to protect it and the beautiful animals that live in it.

I saw the headline on Sunday about the club in Orlando and I refused to open it. I just wanted to bask a little longer on the happiness that my dream realized had brought. I just wanted to think about whales and their society and how they live together in harmony as a family, helping one another, communicating, talking, touching and loving. I wanted to think of Granny, living in the Victoria waters with her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, eating 400 lbs. of Chinook salmon a day, eating some seals and jumping out of the water to get rid of the annoying kelp that tangles on their tails. I wanted to think of that and nothing else.

If you want to know more:

http://whalemuseum.org/collections/meet-the-whales   

https://www.eaglewingtours.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_(orca)