Nowhere Man Syndrome

                I used to have an abusive boyfriend.  A real monster, he damaged me in ways emotionally and physically too numerous to count.  There were clues the size of tree trunks that beneath his jovial façade he was a hateful fuck, but I wouldn’t see them.  It was a hard time: menopause, divorce, my oldest son leaving home, the economy on the verge of collapse.  So I couldn’t afford to see this person for what he was not only because there were good parts, and I was hanging onto them for dear life, but because my being with him was inconsistent with who I believed I was.  I was educated, mature, sensible.  Not the sort of person at all who would be with such a person.  I was not that stupid.  Only I was.

                Once upon a time I sat down to a dinner table laden with marvelous food: salmon en croute, cream of asparagus soup, fine wine, all with people I did not know well.  The matriarch had been cooking all day long and when I had offered to help, she kindly yet forcibly chased me out of the kitchen.  I didn’t really think twice about the half empty bottle of wine on the kitchen counter even though it was only three in the afternoon.  I figured she was cooking with it.   Around seven in the evening when we sat down to dinner I noticed she was completely sloshed, eyes bleary, overly emotional, slurring her words.  No one at the table but me noticed.  These included her two sons and her husband.  As the night progressed and the cook passed out, I asked them how long their mother had been an alcoholic.  To a man they were shocked.  Sure she enjoyed her wine but to their way of thinking “an alcoholic” was something else, some filthy drunkard passed out in an alley clutching a bottle in a paper bag and pissing himself. 

                I came to understand that these people could not see their besotted mother for what she was because the cost was too high.  One of them was continually borrowing money from her, and so needed to see her as half “Mama” and half automated teller machine.  Her husband, a lovely man but a fairly recent acquisition, had been in love with her since his early twenties, which meant he could not see her at all.  Love really is blind.  Also deaf and dumb.

                Both of these little stories are examples of “The Nowhere Man” syndrome, although unlike the Beatles’s song, the people don’t just see what they want to see.  They see only what their emotional budgets can handle.  In the first instance, falling madly in love with a abusive male was so wholly inconsistent with my understanding of self that I couldn’t conceive of it; and in the second, the consequences of accepting the cook’s alcoholism where simply too great.  You can’t continually borrow money from someone drowning in addiction; that would make you a bad person.  You can’t have quiet evenings at home with your lifelong love, fulfilling a desire of decades, when she’s passed out and drooling on your knee.  We humans are storytellers and those are whoppingly bad stories.

                I’ve often thought that humankind would be a lot better off if we were to stop thinking of ourselves as marvelous, special beings and instead took stock of what we really are.  Contrary to what philosophy and religion would have us believe, we are not primarily moral creatures.  We are creatures with physical and psychological needs and granted, sometimes, very brave individuals come alone and take difficult moral stands--Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela come to mind--but these people are the exception that proves the rule.  Primarily, we are animals, and like all animals our major concern is prolonging our own existence. Abraham Maslow described a pyramid of human needs, making the point that until the basic needs are met, the need for food, water, love and belonging, it’s not worth talking about loftier ideas like self-actualization and moral principles.

                Americans are currently on a precipice below of which looms a presidential election.  If humanity’s continued existence is feasible at all, it’s imperative that we elect a sensible candidate and deliver ourselves from the nightmare we’ve been lost in for the past two plus years.  Currently, many liberals, progressives, and much of the Democratic party is wringing its hands about the overt racism of the current occupant of the White House.  But a recent poll, yesterday, indicates that since his despicable comments about 4 non-white congresswomen, his approval rating has actually gone up.  Trump and his moronic rhetoric taps into a vein of the American people so desperate, so scared, so angry, that they behave like a wounded animal and will lash out at anything.  Trump’s racism, in the form of his wholly invented “border crisis,” is giving them exactly what they need.  A target, something to focus on that’s a lot easier than facing real reasons for their misery.  Nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  They have no safety net and a serious illness can decimate entire families.  Public education is failing, yet they support know-nothings like Betsy DeVoss, appointed by a know nothing president so wrapped up in his psychopathology that he couldn’t cares less whether they all live or die.  But they can’t see it.  Their communities are drug addled by floods of prescription medication foisted on them specifically by political power behind Big Pharma.  Their jobs are vanishing but like me, with the abusive boyfriend and the family of the alcoholic mother, the truth is too big and too difficult to tackle.  If you combine this fact with the intense racism currently promulgated by the GOP and it reveals an aspect of human nature so ugly and so inconsistent with what we’d like to believe that many people refuse to even look it. 

And many of them are members of the Democratic party.  I am so tired of its moral outrage, at its answering to the Trumpian dog whistle whenever it blows, that it’s ruining my digestion.  Any successful Democratic presidential nominee is going to have to put forth policies that will improve the lives of the American people, even the real dumb ones, and stop tilting at the giant windmill that calls itself “Trump.”  She will need to craft ideas that the taxi driver who has lost his profession to Uber, can understand and embrace.  They need to come up with a solution for the father of 3 being worked to death at an Amazon warehouse for, big whoop, 15 dollars an hour while the CEO of that company holds the title of richest man in the world.  American citizens need to believe again, that their children can have better lives than they have, instead of worrying about financial ruin should a family member become sick.  They need to accept the science of climate change and help vote in someone who might give their children the chance of inheriting an inhabitable world.  These things must be assured before the millions of Americans sporting MAGA hats concealing desperation borne of utter hopelessness and metastasized into a wholly manufactured hatred of “the other,” can ever be induced to even think about moral principles.  The sputtering and indignant outrage currently being spewed by the twenty something presidential candidates, while morally worthy is, in reality, worth virtually nothing.