“…I felt like laughing, drinking the rusty water from the faucet and urinating. I stood for a while by the sink staring, as if seeking the means to fulfill all these three needs simultaneously. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and looked out into the wet street, its black windows, flat roofs, the glowing sky, without a moon, without stars, opaque and stagnant like some global cover. I leaned out as far as I could, deeply inhaled the fumes of the city, and proclaimed to myself and to the powers of the night:

 I am lost in America, lost forever.”    – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lost In America.

Sometimes, lately, I feel lost in America, perhaps a bit overwhelmed by it, its vastness, complexity, quarrelsomeness, anger and fear.

This election has gone on for too long, is too intense and angry, costs too much money, and is divisive and uninspriring. The more I pay attention to it, the more disturbing it is. I have to deal with that, not just complain about it.

America such a big and complicated place, democracy is sometimes so loud, frustrating and vulgar. Lately I have had the feeling so many others have of not recognizing the country I used to feel has so many shared and common values and truths.

Sometimes, I even feel fearful in America, a completely new experience for me. Like the descendants of so many outsiders and immigrants, I come from people who came here to feel safe, and have always felt safe. I don’t wish to carry it too far, but I don’t always feel safe anymore.

We can’t even agree  any more to make it  more difficult for madmen to slaughter innocent children in their classroom, we are unique to the world in that way.

__

So how do I deal with this? How do I feel about it? Like Singer, the great Nobel Laureate refugee from Poland, do I throw open the windows, lead out the window and shout to the powers of the night that I am lost here, lost in America?

Not yet. I don’t wish to join the growing armies of the angry, the outraged, the members of Victim Nation, the cowards on Facebook and Twitter,  the legions of the Left and the Right. I’d like to be something else, someone else, do something else. We have always been a quarrelsome people, divided in many ways, from the very beginning.

Often much more than this, more violently than this.

History always comforts me. This is not the first time a demagogue has risen up to unleash the winds of fear and hatred. Or the first time madmen slaughtered innocent men, women and children in the name of faith. It was very often worse than this. We did not invent cruelty or division or paralysis.

These are not the worst of times, they are just human times. In history, there is nothing new, just new minds of memory and comprehension.

We are not pillage foreign villages and stealing humans as slaves, we are not burning witches alive, we are not dropping by the millions from dread and known diseases, the world is not filled with war all over, we do not toss female children over the cliff so that we can have sons, we do not prohibit our wives and partners from owning property or voting. We do not see our children die from the common cold.

A philosopher wrote 1,000 years ago, that there has always been one story in the world: the rich screwing the poor, and the poor rising up in anger from time to time.

From the beginning, men and women have struggled to figure out the necessarily evil that is government. We are still struggling to figure it out.

Sitting in a movie theater watching Ghostbusters, I thought all this ghosts zipping around spewing bile reminded me of our political leaders, all of this awful green stuff coming out of their mouths. In our political system, we ask the children to cover their eyes and ears when our leaders come on the tube.

On the left, there is this feeling that if the other side wins, all we be lost. On the right, there is the same feeling. The country cannot win, either way. We have forgotten the common ground we used to share, arguing only about what divides us.

What can I do? Not that. I decline the labels people wish to put on me. I resist the importuning of people who would wish me to hate those who disagree with me, and consider them the enemy. That is what labels do, they shrink our minds and reason.

I try to stand in the shoes of other people, and try to see what they see. There are two or more ways of looking at everything.

I am self-aware about the number of horrific images and arguments my psyche can absorb and be healthy. If I look at the news, and these days I do, it is once or twice a day. I watch few videos. I do not argue my beliefs with others, or insist that they submit to mine. I do not quarrel on Facebook.

Dialogue begins with respect and empathy. And with a commitment to  knowing where I stand.

H.L. Mencken, my faithful guide to democracy, which he considered to be the best among poor options for governing, defined society as a conflict between the superior man and woman and the mob. His portrait of the mob-man was an ideal monster, a creature governed only by emotions, not reason.

His ideas were written more than a half-century ago, they comforted people then, they comfort  me now, and help me understand the America I am living in.  Stay calm, he told his readers. Democracy is an ugly mess, but it is the best ugly mess yet devised for keeping people from killing one another.

Demagogues and “mob men” are an inevitable by-product of democracy he wrote, they have great power to frighten, but no brains to govern.

Of the mob-man, he wrote:

“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who week to liberate the spirit of the race…In two thousands years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t want to know what he knows is not true. The cardinal articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are mainly scoundrels.”

The minds of demagogues who flourish in democratic states, Mencken wrote, are  stocked with fear. They are professors of mob psychology, fear is the foundation and cornerstone of their ideology. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos.

Sometimes, like the great writer Singer, who mourned for the loss of his rich cultural world in Poland, taken by the Nazi’s, I feel lost in America also. It seems too big and angry for me, I feel like a flea in a hurricane, trying just to get out of the wind.

But this is where my life is, and I love the dream and promise of America, I have lived it, it saved my family’s very existence. So I will hold my ground, keep my perspective, keep my sense of humor. In my mind I peer out of my own window, looking out into the hills, the stars in the sky, breathing in the rich smells of the night, singing with the foxes and coyotes and owls to the moon. I proclaim to myself and to the powers of the night:

I am sometimes lost in America, but I will swim in my dreams, and I will be safe again and I will be free.