Carrying a heavy heart into the holiday week
With the holiday approaching, I thought I would spend this past weekend staving off excitement.
I’m typically a person who really enjoys the Thanksgiving holiday, even with the misgivings I have about the history of it. Give me a day with family, eating well, playing games, reflecting on what you’re grateful for, all while football plays in the background, and I find it easy to appreciate the moment.
It also kicks off the Christmas season in full force, which is my family’s favorite time of year. Let’s just say my mom is one of those people who already have their trees and decorations up.
This weekend I just found myself struggling to get into the spirit of the holiday, though, and I doubt I’m the only one.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things I’m personally grateful for. I’ve been fortunate with a lot of what’s happened in my life over the past year.
Throughout the weekend I just felt tired and I guess overwhelmed because we all had one hell of a week.
I mean these last few years overall have been strange, challenging, chaotic and deeply traumatic for many of us in so many ways. But this last week in
particular really hammered home a sense of being on a razor’s edge.
For the first time the U.S. was added to a list of “backsliding democracies” by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Stockholm-based think tank that uses 50 years of democratic indicators in about 160 countries to make its assessments. The organization’s secretarygeneral, Kevin Casas-Zamora, pointed to “the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarization” in our country as concerning.
And of course there have been two prominent legal cases — the Kyle Rittenhouse trial
and the trial of the three men from Georgia who killed Ahmaud Arbery — which certainly hit on some sensitive topics. Rittenhouse was tried for shooting and killing two men and wounding a third at a protest against police violence in Kenosha, Wis., a town he had to cross state lines to reach. Three White men — Travis McMichael, his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan — are on trial for shooting Arbery, a Black man who was jogging in coastal Georgia last year.
In the case that concluded Friday with an acquittal, the Rittenhouse case, it is probably unsurprising that I do not believe justice was served.
But even setting that aside, along with the overall racial component of the two cases, both should pose some very disturbing questions about our country’s tolerance for vigilante violence and how it may be handled going forward. These questions have long existed but take on even greater relevance now, when Americans across the political spectrum are proving more willing to deploy violence against those they disagree with.
As if that wasn’t enough, we had a series of coordinated, large-scale, smash-and-grab robberies in the Bay Area over the weekend, including one Saturday that involved some 80 people robbing a Nordstrom, according to police.
And on Sunday we also saw a tragedy unfold in Waukesha, Wis., when someone drove an SUV into a Christmas parade, killing at least five people and injuring 48.
Frankly, I was stunned to find out Monday that police believe that the suspect was fleeing the scene of a domestic dispute rather than conducting an intentional act of terrorism. The fact that I find myself both surprised and relieved by that motive probably says something troubling about our country’s state of affairs related to domestic terror, given how seemingly commonplace it has become for folks to use vehicles as weapons against crowds of people — particularly protesters.
I bring this all up not to do a
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