Questions and Conversation
Processing the morning’s newsfeed when your children ask questions and you don’t have the answers.
Trump is going to run again. The TV squawkers this morning are saying, it’s not if, but when.
After the commercial break, this: a Trump rally in Oklahoma will be taking place with female Trump-acolyte and gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake.
And all this happening parallel to the revelations of the January 6th hearings in which it has been proven successfully — proven undeniably — that Donald Trump is a dangerous actor; a focused, wanna-be-and-almost-recently-was oligarch; a being (I can’t call him a man) who does not care at all that people were crushed to death defending the capitol; defending democracy ; defending the world against Trump himself.
As usual, my daughter is on her ipad in the next room while I prepare breakfast. When I call her into the kitchen for eggs, she asks, “If Trump wins again, does it mean we’ll have to leave America?”
Our children are listening. They have questions.
I may have once answered her like my father answers my own questions these days. “Don’t be so dramatic,” I might say. But I don’t. Instead, I ask her if she wants more salt (she doesn’t). Then, I tell my husband we need to walk the dogs, which is code for: we need to talk privately.
While our enormous hounds sniff every blade of grass on our street, my husband and I have the same conversation we’ve been having for a while now, only its conclusions are getting closer and closer to reality.
It’s the, “what if” conversation, where we try to imagine every scenario the next few years might bring so we don’t get caught unprepared.
These conversations have taken the place of older conversations in which I felt so certain of my opinions. I’m not certain of anything, these days. So, I talk it out with my husband, with friends, with relatives, with strangers. I flounder for answers and listen for solutions to difficult questions.
Some examples:
Q: What if Trump wins and the state takes over the internet and we lose our privacy? How will communicate with other like-minded people?
Conversation: Is there another internet where Trump and his like went after they were banned from Twitter? Can we use it now? Or make our own? What did dissidents do in Russia (pick any era of oppression)? What did they do in China during the Cultural Revolution? In Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge? In… there are no shortage of examples from history.
Q: Should we buy property in Portugal? (Several famous people and other not-famous people we’ve heard of have already bought property in this almost mythical liberal Valhalla).
Conversation: Neither of us speaks Portuguese. Is there an American school where our daughter could go, or would we home-school her? Could we find support for her learning issues? Her physical issues? Her various medical needs, which are considerable? How would we communicate with the vet?
Which crosses Portugal off the list. How would we even get to Portugal with two huge dogs, especially if it suddenly becomes hard to leave the country because no one can get gas anymore because Russia has cut us all off? Which leads us to Canada. Even though it’s cold there, at least they speak English. It’s just a drive. We can put the dogs into the car. Which leads to,
Q: What if the war goes on in Ukraine and no one can get their hands on gas? What if we get stranded here?
Conversation: Would that be so bad?
(We play out all scenarios and realize we might be just fine. We can use a friend’s new restaurant as a headquarters for our underground liberal lifestyle. We’ll secretly support our gay, trans and ethnically diverse friends, figuring out how in nightly meetings in this restaurant’s courtyard. We’ll use phrases like, “More calamari over here!” to mean, “We need more estrogen pills for our trans teen!” or maybe that phrase will mean, “We have room in our house to hide another activist.” I don’t know. I can only imagine.)
Q: Is my imagination fertile enough?
Conversation: My father thinks it’s much too fertile. He thinks I’ve gone off the deep end. Yet, I ask this: If we aren’t in the deep end right now, here in the still-but-barely United States (or should we just call them what they are, the Un-united States?), where, exactly, are we?
In my estimation, we are in the place in a pool where you are on your tip toes, chin raised to keep from being submerged. One more step and you won’t be able to breathe without being actually swimming; or without floaties; or without knowing how to tread water. Without the right skill set, you might drown.
All right. You get the idea. I can’t include every thread of conversation we’ve had since the day Trump announced his run for President (the first time).
What informs these conversations?
Everything.
Plus, books like “Night,” by Elie Wiesel, “The Painted Bird,” by Jerzy Kozinski.
Movies like “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” “Schindler’s List,” “Life is Beautiful,” “Jojo Rabbit.”
Plays like Caryl Churchill’s, Far Away, and William Golding’s, Lord of the Flies and Kazuo Ishiguro’s, Remains of the Day.
Paintings like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Goya’s, The Third of May 1808, Picasso’s Guernica.
I search and search, scouring my personal index of survival stories, considering everything so I’m prepared for the darkest of what we already know one human can do to another, even at a time in history when we have a choice of oat milk, almond milk or soy. I don’t want to be caught off-guard; unprepared; naïve when the writing is in bold marker like grafitti on all the walls of our society: “We are in trouble!”
When I get back to the house from our morning what-if walk, our daughter is up in her room getting dressed for the day.
Question: What will I tell her when she asks again?
Possible Conversation: We don’t plan to leave, right now, sugar, but we’re monitoring things; considering options. Keeping our eyes open.
Question: Is this wrong approach? Do I say, These news reporters like to make people like us anxious. The truth is, all is fine.
Question: What is truth today?
Question: What do you say to your children? What is it time for? Do we have a to-go bag ready in the hallway, or serve our kids a plate of eggs like it’s any other day?
Question:
