Civic duty

Two weeks until elections and the anger is all around me. It clings to everything, everywhere. Globs of it.

I see red-faced people screaming on the tv. Families who unfriend each other on facebook. I hear talk of Armageddon.

The anger fills our days now. It is gelatinous and it is semi-translucent. Children and dogs and an old lady in the Heights have drowned in it.

That’s just this week.

So far.

Workers with shovels come trying to remove the anger. To cart it away. The workers are tiny. They wear overalls intended for babies, probably. The workers scoop the anger into red wheelbarrows. Into dump trucks and oaken barrels. Tupperware bowls. A cracked CD case for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors. A hollow plastic model of the expanding universe. An old VCR and your mother’s cupped hands.

I wonder where they take it all to.

Someday, many years from now, I suppose, my grandchildren will peer up at me and say, “Zeze” – for that is what they will call me, inexplicably – “what did you do to stop the bad things from happening back in 2016?”

And I will be compelled to admit to them that I, in my great negligence, failed to do anything, to say anything. Perhaps it is not so great after all, my negligence.

In the face of anger and screaming, I could have at least found the courage to post my thoughts on what’s happening instead of writing about chokers and broken keys…