Decking the Gall with Bows of Folly

Winter solstice marks the resurrection of light and warmth, offering the promise of rebirth any minute. So, it seems, while we’re stuck in what's called holiday time waiting around for that, we’ve all busied ourselves promoting what we happen to be hoping for, as animatedly as the lively, loopy, nonstop schemers in American Hustle.

Hope is, of course, the revealing of desire. It's like a shopping order that's reached the shipping options stage. We know what we want and now have to figure out how to get it. Our hopes appear as New Year’s resolutions and predictions and bets, wishes, requests and expectations, like for a bonus. Those craving some sort of transcendent salvation put their hopes anew in the old baby Jesus, a so called Messiah mythically born at this worst of times. Even kids get into the act, telling Santa what they want.

Hand it to Santa for satisfaction guaranteed. He actually delivers. Mr. Claus may be old fashioned but he's the prototype consumer delivery drone flying through the sky dropping stuff down chimneys left and right: legos, iPads, Elmo, two front teeth. Amazon is just a wannabe.

Maybe they will fill a gap because we grown-ups aren't getting the same premium hope shipping service kids have.  A few days ago, at the exact moment of Solstice, I was in a house of worship listening to congregants ask their God to bring them peace, show them mercy, and protect them from obstacles. I could be wrong, but I do think these folks have been placing this order for almost 2,000 years now, and it never comes-- even in this heyday of instant gratification. Perhaps there is no longer a maker or its delivery service was paralyzed by weather and demand like the UPS fleet on Dec 24.

Something is definitely amiss. For the last 92 years, every Miss America contestant has valiantly declared what she really hopes for in her heart of hearts is not Prince Charming, thinner thighs or a million dollars, but world peace. Have you seen any? For way longer, maybe since the beginning of human time, every politician solemnly swears he wants a chicken in every pot or jobs in every household. Got any? These guys also swear what they really truly hope for is not a lifetime on the public dole, but truth and justice for all—change you can believe in. Ho ho ho. Everybody knows the only guy who delivers truth and justice for all is Superman. That phone booth costume change you can believe in.

Santa Claus, Superman…reality doesn't seem to deliver like these fictitious guys. Maybe the call center has been outsourced to Mars where nobody speaks our languages, because we keep ordering stuff like tolerance and equality, purpose and decency, but none of it ever arrives the way pizza does from Domino's. Just look at the unrelenting hopelessness in the headlines: arrogant Obama screws up without apology, the two main tribes of South Sudan are massacring each other (“It’s politics between two people making thousands of people die,”), imperious Chris Christie bollixes up the George Washington Bridge as he bullies everybody in his way, Tibetans are burning themselves to death because the genocidal Chinese won’t let them live as Tibetans; the Sunnis and the Shiites are bumping each other off faster than Sicilian mafia gangs; Germany is suffocating Greece and Spain; Syria’s Assad is gassing its citizens to death; Thai peasants are violently protesting the resentment of the Thai urban class; the Turkish prime minister fires the prosecutor investigating bribes he took; Boeing announces record billions in profit and executive pay while threatening to move from Seattle if minimum wage for its workers rises, Hillel Houses won’t let their Jewish students speak to Palestinians, guys make revenge porn a fetish.

It’s just as yecch in the much-vaunted private sector. These last few weeks, so many people have hoped I could help or confided their secret hope, I feel like some freaky 911 Santa Claus. My Los Angeles friend phoned on his birthday, crying because his blue-eyed, blond marriage partner picked that day of days to totally terminate the relationship. All my friend wanted for his birthday was his lover back and what he got was a huge, fat Cancelled stamp on that hope. An hour later I got an email from my heart son hoping I would come solve the problem of his Mom who was grinding her teeth, short breathing and showing other signs of hidden anxiety. I drove the 60 miles and tried to talk eye to eye to a 58-year-old longtime widow whose culture forbids her from ever remarrying, a woman who has no education, little ability to speak English, and, I think she thinks, no reason to get up in the morning, no reason to exist. Her sons are married and working, ditto their wives. She wants grandchildren. She wants to take care of them day and night. She hopes to get purpose back that way, but neither her sons nor their wives are up for that. So while she hopes for meaning to life, her teeth grind and her chest heaves in the vacuum.

I got home to a text message from a young friend who needed to be rescued from her visiting mother in law, a widow who sits like a princess never lifting a finger to help with the two babies, the housework or cooking even though my young friend works a fulltime job and takes care not only of the two babies but her own diabetic father. I took her and her 3-year-old with me to the farmers’ market and playground and fussed over them. When I got home, I found an email from my French “sister” pushing me to tell her whether or not I was going to help her escape from her childishly narcissistic husband by taking her to Nepal this spring. Otherwise she had no hope for relief.

I couldn’t answer because my upstairs neighbor was in meltdown. There were complications for her and the baby born four days ago so she had to keep going back to the hospital. The 3-year-old had come home from school with pinkeye and somehow her husband found a ghastly stomach flu. “I’m dealing with shit everywhere,” she cried. “And now the garage door doesn’t work. Please can you fix it. I need something to be working.”  My friend in Maine, the one whose ex-husband died a few months back, needed something to be living, or so the email said. “I didn’t tell you my sister died last week and our oldest cousin was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was sorting this out when I got a call that my old Peace Corps friend, the one I traveled with over the years, died of a heart attack. What a sad, sad Christmas here.”

Trying to sound hopeful, I wrote to my friend that I thought the universe was clearing out her closet, making space for something brand new coming soon. I packed up, got on a plane and flew across the country to be at a family event for my childhood friend who was now her family matriarch. I sat next to one of our college classmates, a woman of the 1%, who I would like to tell you has it all except she doesn’t, as she explained. It’s sometimes maddening to be in the house with husband, children, grand children, pets, with no space for herself. What she hopes to find, and soon, is inner peace. Perhaps through yoga, perhaps through meditation she hopes to create that private space. I mentioned a few books.

The next day I read in The New York Times, the paper of record, psychiatrists say the most common patient complaint of the moment is metastasizing anxiety. Foreboding is the stench rising from all the glitter and glam. I’d diagnose that as fear the great hedge against panic, wealth, will no longer be what the 1% hoped it would: power…the protection it provides. It will be easy come, easy go a la Bernard Madoff. What went up will fall down. I’d say that’s fear dreams will not come true, wishes be fulfilled, hope ripen. I'd say: terminal cancer of the optimism nerve.

All in all, scene by scene, sounds like we’re a disaster movie in the making, the gilded age morphing into a gilded cage. Here's the way Stephen Holden lyrically put it in The Times: “…serious films are reacting to runaway capitalism and its fallout with suspicion, disgust and nihilistic exuberance. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they ask, whom can you trust? … Everywhere there is widespread future shock. As technological innovation accelerates faster than our ability to assimilate it, movies express a creeping sense of powerlessness, the future determined not by humans but by algorithms. As institutions and social structures dissolve, we are on our own, fearful of being left behind in a stampede that must be heading somewhere. Or not.”

Well, so much for all the fa la la this year. Many of us are either feeling like the Coen Brothers’ bumbling failure, Llewyn Davis, or the Wolf of Wall Street decking his gall with vows of folly.  We are ass deep in hype about faster, finer, filtered have it your way coming at you instant gratification, you above all, winner take all. Life as a selfie or instagram. We are all hoping to be winners taking it all, but somehow in this moment of revealing our hopes, we appear to be feeling like losers.

Forty years ago Mick Jagger complained about getting no satisfaction, and where is it when we need it? We're so miserable we've since got ourselves a whole new billion dollar boom industry of life coaches telling us "Just be happy." Since that's what we truly hope for, fads and scams abound. We hope our hope order will to be delivered even though there does not seem to be any toll-free 888 number to call right now, right now in the next five minutes and we'll ship for free! You can't even pay for the inner peace that brings genuine happiness with a credit card, money order or bitcoin. You can't buy it like toys for tots. That could be the problem.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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