American Scarecrow

"I just keep picking it up and putting it back in again!" said the Scarecrow. He was referring to the hay that was used to make his body. Some of his insides had fallen out after tumbling. It was a good tumble, the result of being rescued after Dorothy helped him off the pole. In the cornfield along the Yellow Brick Road he was being used to scare prey. “Does it hurt you?” Dorothy asked, watching him stuff his insides back in. The Scarecrow brushed off the question, and continued to put his body back together.

Brainless and straw-filled, he foreshadowed the future of America.

Too much has been written about "what happened," in the United States to lead us here. Here. In 2018, to a place where too many of us feel anxious and hyper-vigilant as we go through our day-to-day lives. The phrases, "I can't look at the news," or "I have to stay off Facebook," because it is "stressing me out too much," are regularly uttered by most people I know.

Can't look at the news? What ever happened to reading “the news”? You know, those current events that make it into the paper or the nightly broadcast?

A new library is being built.

There was a car accident.

It is going to rain tomorrow.

Horoscopes are on page 11.

Advice about work and family relationships is on page 14.

This is not the nature of the news anymore. My mother does a lot of Sudoku. My friend Anna whizzes through the crossword puzzles. Games are good distractions. And of course there is a wellness industry built around these particular issues: intense stress borne simply from existing in our culture. Every corner of the real world and the Internet offers a yoga, meditation, or nutrition solution to our stress problem. A myriad studies correlate antisocial behavior and depression with social media, which has unfortunately become our main source of news. The President constantly refers to any news except for right-wing editorializing Fox as "Fake News." So we are asked, daily, to not only carry the usual burdens that go along with adulthood, but also question the reality of the very news that we are scared to read anyway.

“Make it go away,” I tell my blankets as I curl up with them at night, after I put my young children to bed. We all know that social media is too explosive for our brains. Consuming it is like binging on Halloween candy. It's very exciting when you open up the bag:

"Hey look, everything, all in one place, and all mine!"

But then after you eat a few pieces in rapid fire, you feel sick. Your body cannot metabolize that much sugar. And, the content of the social media “feed,” which used to be “news,” but is certainly not “newly received information,” anymore, is distressing. As Joe Biden and others have noted, decency seems to have gone as far away as Dorothy did from Kansas.

In the last 311 days, the United States has endured 307 mass shootings. Americans against Americans. We are on guard too much of the time. That is not how humans are supposed to function. We cannot do it for very long without our systems crashing. Collectively, we walk on eggshells into the next family conversation and headline, day after day. Some of us explain to our four year olds over dinner what a “lock down drill,” means, and have to answer the inevitable questions about the “stranger who is not supposed to be there,” but won’t ever come.

My nervous system is shot. Shot.

And I’m lucky, because neither my children nor I have actually ever been shot. And we're privileged white people living in Brooklyn. So we're the lucky ones with the better odds. And still, I have these two boys to raise. I knew it would be challenging. But I did not anticipate this level of fear. Obama was elected President for his first term a month after I got married. The dark night of the misguided war had lifted.

Now, my children’s biggest threat is another American. A white guy, like mine will be when they grow up. The stranger who might shoot them is mentally ill, delusional, narcissistic, and he is one of many. He gathers recipes for how to make lethal weapons on the Internet in his basement. Think about that life. Hours that turn into days, spent with the only light emanating from a computer screen. He will find them in school or a college bar. He will kill them on sight.

As I lie in bed at night, I repeat, “He won’t ever come.” But my grown up voice adds, “Until he does.”

It is not normal, in any variation of what that word means, to be on constant guard about mass murders of innocent citizens by fellow citizens. It is not normal in war zones. It is not normal in places where people are persecuted for their political views or their religions. It is not normal in places where people disagree. It is not normal at school, a concert, the shopping mall, the house of worship, or the college bar.

I often wake up from 3 to 5am. I eventually look at my phone and pull up the headlines. The news is always still churning. Another tweet from the President about how disgraceful I am for being a registered Democrat. Another celebrity combatting the tweet with a pithy response that sounds “out of touch” to rural conservatives. And the cycle goes on.

I was sick recently. A horrible hacking cough and congestion. Body aches sapped my energy for days. And I told my therapist that during the cold, although I felt miserable, something strange happened. I’d stopped worrying so much. My worry level went from 11 to 3.

“The body takes over,” she told me. “The body’s needs are always met by the mind. That is the mind-body connection everyone talks about.” (It’s something I’m not as good at feeling as my therapist). “So when the body is sick, or fighting,” she continued, “the mind has to go along. And the inverse is also true. When the mind is racing, the body can calm it down. This is why deep breathing practice works. Meditation. Progressive muscle relaxation. So when you cannot sleep because your mind is racing, do your deep breathing. Envision your muscles un-tensing, one by one.”

I try this because I know she is right. I beg my muscles to relax. But they seem to be hearing impaired. Eventually, though, they have no choice but to un-tense for a few moments. They need to refuel for the next leg of the journey down this Yellow Brick Road. They have children to carry along. We travel, despite our fatigue. But we are not looking for Oz. I gave up on thinking there was a Wizard at the end of the road the first time I had to explain lock down drills to my four year old.

But there is good news, too. A ray of hope. And if you let yourself open up your mind, cry out your expectations, and look again, after you wipe all those tears off of your face, you’ll realize that despite all of this hyper-vigilance and the climate of fear, you are stronger than you ever thought you could be. You have already come to your rescue. You are the one reassuring your children about the stranger you are afraid of. You are tossing out the Halloween candy, insulating your family from the damage of social media. In the midst of nervous system shattering fear, you do a crossword puzzle. You solve Sudoku. Maybe you even read that advice on page 14 of the newspaper. You might be like me, awake from 3 to 5am, but I bet you still get your kids to school on time, and you, to work. Even when you are too exhausted to do much else, remember that none of this is normal and you are incredible. You have mastered it. You never needed Oz. Keep stuffing your insides back in again.