It’s 2:30 am. I’m sitting in dark silence, in a lazy boy chair in my living room. No moon; the windows black. About ten feet in front of me, a nightlight reveals a door leading off into unending darkness. The light only makes the night darker.

 

Night focuses attention and surprisingly reveals more than it hides. It releases into the theatre of my mind a whole history of the forgotten that is waiting in the wings to be seen again. The room around me, the chair I sit in, the plants by the window, the book I was reading before I fell asleep, all take on new meaning. The immediacy of my mind, the reality of my life right then, is startlingly clear.

 

I had had a dream. I was on a beach near a body of water. It seemed at first to be a river, a big one, then as an inlet to the ocean. It was morning. I was maybe in my 30s. 6 or 8 young people, unknown to my waking self but not to my dream persona, were there with me. The weather was warm. I ran into the water. But when I started swimming, I noticed the wind waking up and the sky turning gray. I quickly left the water, to get a better view of the sky and weather, and then to warn the other people. Unbelievably, it looked like the air would soon turn to ice; and freezing temperatures, winter was coming. Now.

 

One man would not leave the water. I ran back to the river to reason with him. He said he didn’t care about winter; didn’t care if the water turned to ice. He wanted to turn to ice himself. I left him in the water; it continued to get colder. The man was growing indistinct, as was the sky and the water and everything. Everything was becoming gray, foggy, wintry. The people and place were indecipherable.

 

Why did the man want to turn into ice? Did he dread feeling anything, or feeling emotion more than cold? Feeling his world threatened more than his humanity lost? There’s awareness and there’s denial. There’s night and there’s winter.

 

Like our situation today. Ever since DT, winter has taken on even more emotion and depth. He’s affected the deepest levels of our personal and national psyches. Maybe that’s part of the meaning of the dream. Like ancient people who didn’t understand the science of seasons and might’ve questioned if spring would ever come again, we might do the same. Unlike the man of ice, we today might detest or fear winter, at least the winter of DT. We might fear that spring, a future where our rights and freedoms are protected, might not come again in our lifetime. And we’d have to live in a frozen world.

 

But maybe the winter won’t be quite as cold as it was shaping up to be a few months ago. DT is finally getting resistance not only from “we the people” but from the GOP. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a strong MAGA adherent, now speaks against him. And as columnist Scott Dworkin reports, as of this writing, there have so far been 3 days in a row of protests at the Lincoln Memorial in our capital, 3 days of thousands calling for the impeachment of DT. This news unfortunately didn’t appear in many major press reports.

 

 

And until I heard a program recently on NPR’s Throughline, I didn’t realize that Thanksgiving wasn’t a national holiday until1863…

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.