A Whisper Of The Darkness

I have written elsewhere of the deadness and dryness that my bipolar condition can induce, the nausea with writing, with politics, with everything, the illness casts around you like a tangled net.

I had a hint of it yesterday morning while lying in bed dozing and drifting in the hour before the alarm was due. Old habits die hard. For many years my brain was used to waking up on command from the night before. If I had to be up at 6:00 am, I simply told my brain so and it woke up then. With age and illness this capacity ceased to be reliable, so I went back to alarm clocks, but sometimes merely knowing that I must go to work will still wake me earlier than my alarm. So I drift and doze and usually end up getting up 15-30 minutes before the alarm would ring as I slowly get awake enough to realize how hungry I am.

But in the dozing back and forth yesterday was a whisper of the darkness. It started with a flash of the my growing disgust with the Presidential cheerleaders who excuse all erosion of our freedom in the name of the "war on terror". Who are too blockheaded to understand that the "war on terror" is also a domestic war on American life. And who are too hyperventilated to understand that there must be balance and intelligence about how we approach our enemies, a weighing of real possibilities, and an understanding of them beyond the mere repetition of the mantra "Islamofascist! Islamofascist! Islamofascist!".

In that balanced understanding is the firm conviction that we can lose this war forever, no matter what enemies we defeat, if we abandon our own values as a country and a people. The racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic remarks which poison our radio talk turn my stomach. You can read them three posts below, if you haven't already.

The shrill, "Save my poor children from the terrorists!" of the women for whom 9/11 was a religious conversion experience into true believers in the military pugnacity of the Republican party; the testosterone poisoned young men of the blogosphere who are too rabid for the obliteration of enemies to even examine their contemptable misuse of raw language in their posts in ways that are merely squalid and not strong; and my good friends on the right side of the house, cowering at the shadows of Osama Bin Laden, but refusing to confront the substance of how badly we have fought him up to now, all repel me. And yesterday morning they repelled me absolutely, making me feel like turning my back on dialog forever.

Alexandra's little challenge of the Ten Worst Americans brought me out of it and into the light again.

But the darkness remains, whispering, whispering, whispering.