Itchy Eyes

I guess it’s been a few weeks that I’ve been walking around with eyes that itch, except it’s not an actual itch. It’s… you know that feeling, the feeling where you’re about to cry, except most of the time I’m not crying. I’m just walking around feeling like I could at any moment. I think being closer to tears would be better, somehow, a more active catharsis where I might feel momentary relief. This is more of a crying meniscus, the surface tension holding this feeling at the edge of awareness.

I wish there were a word for this brimming feeling, a slight burn that feels like a constant reminder of the horror and waste we’ve unleashed on the world and on ourselves as we abandon all of our commitments. Many of those commitments—like USAID programs—weren’t free gifts. They were reparations, in many cases, for shitty things this country has done. They were the glue that was attempting to hold places together that our country had helped to break. They were relics from what is now a foreign time, a time when we believed in the world.

I have read so many great and necessary think pieces and essays about what is happening to this country. It is all these things: end-stage capitalism destroying itself, a delusional idea run through ChatGPT to gather three pieces of evidence in a sub-par college paper not based on reality, a festering of groupthink, a blatant disregard for law, for history, for the people who actually built what was good about this place.

I don’t think there’s a way for this country to be great or even good again. I think we’re past the point where Project 2025 has found all the cracks and split them wide open. I think someone better start a Google Doc for a new constitution. I don’t think I’m even mourning about that. I think I’m mourning for all the stupidity of the suffering that will be felt by the average people all around me. The feeling where you hear a bang and you turn around in slow motion just as the edge of a vision of destruction is about to unfurl.

I’m mourning the massive waste of wealth, accumulated knowledge, science, potential, effort, energy, desire, and dreaming that could have accomplished so many things. Still might, but after it’s picked up and unpacked on the other side. The other side of what’s facing us now.

I’m not mourning for the destruction of the country, as an abstraction, because what is a country? I don’t even know anymore.

The most patriotic I have ever felt was standing in a CVS parking lot in Columbus, Ohio. I had recently given birth to my son and, as a grad student, couldn’t afford either the university health insurance or any private option, back in the days I’m sure we’re returning to when you got charged extra because you had a uterus. Anyway, I had been added to the state CHIP healthcare program and I had filled a prescription, and the cost was ZERO. Someone gave me a bag with a bottle of pills inside because a policy said that they wanted to help keep people, and including moms and young children without money, alive.

I was standing on the blacktop amid the painted yellow lines, and the sky above was blue, and I felt a sense that I wasn’t alone, and that some big faceless system didn’t even guilt trip me. It just said, “Here’s your antibiotics.”

I’m sure I had received many other things scot-free from the government, including the generous hand-outs and tax breaks paid to suburban homeowners including my parents, but a country isn’t what you receive. That was a moment of real need met at a point where there was zero in the checking account, a moment where I what I could hold a gift in my hand that I needed to stay alive. It wasn’t a hand out—it was a boost until I could get us to a better place, one that so many people need. I felt like I mattered, even without having money, and that felt like hope, and like the country was investing in me.

What I feel now, I suppose, with these itchy eyes is mourning at the terrible waste and the pain. These people walking around wanting to see “America Great” again did not see or ever take in the fact that, though there was a lot that didn’t work, there was plenty that was Good Enough, that the people who live here and their lives are what would make any country great: because of their humanity.

You can love a home, like you love a family, even if it’s not perfect. One of the million failures happening now is the failure to see that ordinary people in this ordinary place are already great. Great not as in mighty or fearsome but awesome, fine, super. Great as in, “This will do. Let’s get to work!”

I abhor the suffering that’s already unleashed and the suffering to come. I believe that the people I consider great—the activists, the radicals, the mutual aid folks, the wine moms, the college kids, the labor folks, the church and religious congregations, the people who make parks, the people who bring food to their neighbors—will, though exhausted, continue to do great things in the face of crisis. Great with a small “g,” great like the sticker you’d get on a spelling test with a 93. Not amazing, not fabulous, not perfect. Just doing what needs to be done.

The reflex that kicks in at the end of the essay is, I think, a moral obligation toward hope or meaning or perspective. It’s a routine, and this is the form I’ve chosen, and part of why I love the form is that it makes me into the person I want to be.

So: I believe in you, my friends. I believe that none of us are going to use ChatGPT to figure out a solution to these million crises. I believe that all of us know there’s no Easy Button. But this is what we share: nonfiction, the realm of reality, the commitment to describing and facts in the face of people who have lost all connection to it. Every one of us wakes up with hope still burning in their chests, because we believe in each other, and that’s the small fire we have to carry forward. Maybe what I am feeling, that itch in my eyes, is the smoke from the fire that is the hope for us I am carrying.