Day 292…
That yesterday was Sunday, caught me completely by surprise.
I didn’t just think that it was Saturday, I knew that it was Saturday. When Michael tried to correct me, I pulled out my phone to prove him wrong.
I’m still not sure when I lost the day. Christmas Day seemed twice as long as a usual day so maybe that’s when it happened. Not, of course, that it mattered, but I was planning to go to the bank and to the post office.
Early yesterday, I registered for what I thought was my final unemployment check.
The President, who spent the day much as he had many others recently, golfing, had dug his heels in against signing the stimulus deal. Many of the things he particularly objected to in the bill were things his own staff had put in there on his behalf. The government was facing an imminent shutdown.
There is always somebody worse off than you are, and I know that Michael and I are extremely fortunate in that we still have several options ahead of us. Many Americans who are also relying on these payments, do not.
For a sizable percentage of the US population, these payments are the only thing that is putting food on the table.
The eviction protections that have been put in place were also due to run out. Millions of people who have had their rental payments deferred were going to need to pay up on Friday. Without income and without protection, we were about to see an unprecedented wave of evictions at the worst time of year possible.
Michael and I were going to need to sit down and figure out how we were going to get through these next few months without anything coming in at all. I really wasn’t sure what we were going to do, but I can’t say that I was particularly panicked about it. Unlike many others, we are blessedly not facing eviction. Yet. I was also more than a little convinced that something had to happen and that it would.
I also didn’t panic yesterday because I’m just not sure I have much of that ability left.
Many years ago, my mother took my ex and I on a trip to Namibia.
Namibia used to be called Southwest Africa. It had been colonized by the Germans during the mad European scramble for Africa. The Germans were driven out by the South Africans in 1915 and after World War I, the League of Nations placed the area under South African jurisdiction.
In 1990, they gained their independence.
Namibia is a strange and wondrous place.
While many Nazis fled to South America after World War II, many also made their way down to the former German colony. When we were there, Hitler’s birthday was still being celebrated by some. With the growth in their international tourism and the passing of that generation, that part of the culture seems, thankfully, to have somewhat subsided.
It is the driest sub-Saharan country in Africa and the desert is one of the oldest on the planet. When you see giant orange-red sand dunes with razor-sharp crests that stretch for miles in 4x4 TV commercials, chances are you are looking at Namibia.
Part of our trip was a week-long flying safari up Namibia’s northern area also called the Skeleton Coast.
We were a small group - the three of us and just four others and our guide. To get around, we had two tiny 6-seater planes. The three of us were in one with everybody’s luggage and the food and the four others and the guide were in the second.
At the time, I was a somewhat nervous flier. I flew all the time, but I couldn’t help worrying about every single thing that could go wrong.
On a 747, you can usually stop thinking about the fact that you are flying through the air in a metal tube. In a tiny plane, that never happens.
Our pilot was an enthusiastic twenty-something year old guy who had just left the air force.
The Namib stretches along most of the northern coast of Namibia. It is the only desert in the world that is right up against an ocean. It is called the Skeleton Coast because ships would wreck off the coast and survivors would make it to shore only to find thousands of miles of sand dunes between them and any hope of salvation.
We had to meet the planes at the airport in Windhoek, the capital.
They were late in coming. The only airport people that seemed to be around were all up in the control tower, so we went up the stairs to find out what was going on. One of the guys up there asked us to keep a look out for them in one direction so that he could keep concentrating on his screen.
Finally, they arrived. They were SO small.
All of us were anxious.
We loaded everything in and took off. The initial flight was about 500 miles over nothing but sand towards the sea. The planes were so tiny that every single air pocket caused the plane to drop or bump.
We thought we were going to die.
The pilot, however, was completely upbeat. At one point he handed over controls of the plane to my mother.
Then we knew we were going to die.
From that point on, we had near-death experiences about every three or four minutes. For an entire week.
We landed on anything and everything except a runway. Sometimes the landing strip was a place that had been previously cleared and was marked by stones, but sometimes it was just a place that looked flat. We all got good at being able to point such places out.
We landed near a seal colony once and got out to have a look at them. Getting back in, we couldn’t take off because the wheels had gotten stuck in the sand. All four of us had to get out and pull and push the plane onto firmer ground before we could get back in and take off.
There is a weird weather thing that happens in the mornings there where a cloud bank settles in about 100 feet off the ground, goes up about another 100 feet before the sky above it is clear again. By afternoon, this layer burns off.
Taking off, it means that once you enter the cloudbank, you can’t see the other plane until you get on top of it. We were all on plane spotting detail. Sometimes they were far away and sometimes they were almost on top of us.
Landing through it was a whole other proposition.
More times than I can remember, we’d descend through the cloud layer and there’d be something in the way. A giant dune would appear right in front of us and the pilot would have to suddenly swerve up to avoid hitting it. Once, when the layer was lower than usual, we broke through and there were fences right in front of us, so up we went again.
At the beginning, it was all beyond terrifying. Lots of yells and gasps and clutching of each other. As the week wore on, however, we just got used to it.
“Rock!” we’d say and up we’d swerve.
“Dune!” and he’d bank to the right.
The time we broke through and the fences were in front of us, is the only time I remember the pilot saying, “oh, sh@#”. The rest of the time he’d just laugh. By the end of the trip, so would we.
In 2016, when the President won the election, I feared for the worst.
On the day after his inauguration, we went to Washington D.C. and marched in the Women’s March. We anticipated being out on the streets all through his Administration, but that didn’t happen. We just got used to it.
We didn’t march when he pulled us out of the Paris accord.
We didn’t march as Betsy DeVos gutted the country’s education system.
We didn’t march for any of the hundreds of other despicable things that happened, any of which under previous Presidents would have driven us out into the streets in protest.
There was just too much.
We didn’t march for anything until George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis and then we marched a lot.
Until we stopped.
The weeks leading up to the election and the weeks leading to the President-elect’s inauguration on January 20, have maybe been the most fraught politically in any of our experiences. There is nothing comparable to it in our conscious memory.
Even everything that roiled the nation around Richard Nixon’s crimes doesn’t begin to compare with what we are seeing now.
I don’t really know who or what convinced the President to sign the bill at the last minute, last night. I don’t really care. I’m sick of thinking about him. I’m sick of worrying about him.
As more and more of his supporters abandon him, the less formidable he becomes. Even the New York Post, who has stood by him through thick and thin, turned on him this morning with a scathing cover story urging him to finally concede.
The President, himself, is turning against allies who he feels are not giving him full support. He’s beginning to run out of people.
He complained that the $600 payments promised to Americans were too low and demanded that it be upped to $2,000.
Republicans didn’t want the payment in there at all but were forced to bow under the pressure of the consequences they would face if they denied their constituents that money. The President’s reaction to the bill seems to have surprised them all.
Democrats jumped all over it and the House is expected to vote on the increase to $2,000 today. It will need a 2/3 majority to pass which means that some Republicans are going to need to support it and all indications are that some will.
If it passes, it will be up to the Senate Majority Leader to decide whether or not the Senate will vote on it. Does he decide yes, make the President happy but go against what he and other Republicans stand for, or does he stand firm? These payments will just add to an already jaw-dropping and ballooning deficit.
Standing firm, means he upholds his ideals but goes against the President and keeps the American people from receiving money that they all need. He will be blamed by all of them.
There is still the election in Georgia upon which his entire future hangs. Choosing not to vote for the increase is not going to make voters in Georgia want to vote Republican.
Republicans and the President are digging themselves deeper and deeper into holes that are going to be extraordinarily difficult to get out of. The deeper in they get, the less anxiety I feel, so my feeling is, just keep digging. In the face of the President’s threats, the more people who stand up to him the weaker he gets.
Ginda said it best in the Wizard of Oz. When confronted by her sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, she said, “Oh, rubbish! You have no power here. Be gone, before somebody drops a house on you, too. “
Ultimately, all it took to get rid of the Wicked Witch was a bucket of water.
It’s long past time for all of us to get ourselves some buckets.
❤️Be Gone... isnt that bug spray?! 💕🙏❤️