High Water Everywhere

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I went to the museum to get away from the feeling of being waterboarded by the news. It worked, for a brief while. But the comfort provided by big picture thinking has been washed away by a flood of unbelievables. Once more I find myself searching for higher ground.

What I’m trying to describe is this feeling of being uprooted and adrift. Forget the particulars- it’s a whole framework that’s being eviscerated. Writing these words with Memorial Day in back of me and July 4th around the corner, I’m struck by how these “holidays” – ceremonial conventions that provide a sense of belonging to a larger community- have been turned on their heads and stripped of meaning since January 20th, 2025.

Memorial Day? Forget about remembering. We have become subject to those who want to us to close our eyes and forget. (We should call it Repression Day.)

Independence Day? What happened to “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed?”

And in between these holiday anchors, 1)“No Kings” Day that took place on the anniversary of the flag that once stood for something; and 2) Juneteenth- a holiday that should carry enormous meaning for all of us, and that didn’t even get mentioned by the man who is trying, with all too much success, to transform the position of President into that of Monarch, despite our protests.

So as I continue to struggle with how to respond to the horrible particulars that we are being bombarded with every day (Marines in LA, legislators murdered in Minnesota, undeclared war against Iran, and the ongoing horror that we are facilitating in Gaza), I am mindful that (at least for me) the bigger catastrophe is the War on Meaning that is taking place underneath it all. We are in danger of becoming a “transactional universe.”

I know we see things through the lens of our own time, and I suspect that this “uprooted” feeling has been part of the human experience for as long as we have been Sapiens. Imagining backwards, I can see a connection to the spiritual needs that are part of our human consciousness and that have somehow kept us going through other historic periods of uprootedness.

And here I find myself once more, seeking the comfort of big picture and higher ground. That’s my way of trying to keep my head above water and trying not to succumb to alternative strategies like “I must be dreaming” or “this is all a simulation.” The search for higher ground is adaptive. Perhaps in similar prehistoric circumstances, we have role models in those first creatures who were able to propel themselves out of the water and onto the land. Or those dinosaurs who took to the air and became our birds.

Maybe this is what evolution is all about.

Three High Water Songs: