My country ‘tis of thee

There should be a word for this feeling.

 It is not despondency or melancholia, although there are tinges. It is not anger, although there is banked fire. It is the disconnect of disconnection, the pain of loss, the ache of brokenness, leavened by a Leonard Cohenish dollop of dark optimism. “There’s a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in.”

 I have thought about what “it” is, what this feeling is that has blanketed me like fog as I’ve read Happy New Year’s messages, as I’ve tried to wrap my head around the “happy” part.

 Here is what I think it is as we enter 2024: It is that we are all citizens of the land of the wounded. I don’t mean personal wounds, although there are those, and they hurt. I mean deep deep wounds to the body politic, to the country itself, to—okay, I’ll say it--to ideals, to values, to compassion and generosity, to justice and fairness.

 This is the zeitgeist of our time.

 In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

 I want us to remember that we too hold dual passports: one to this severely wounded country we see before us in 2024, the one where a man running for president says immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, the one some call “the new normal,” which is, we cannot forget, not normal at all; and one to that other country, the kingdom of the well, the one where our best selves live, the one where we care. The one where we act on caring.