A Cure for the Wintertime Blues

BY ART CULLEN

Leaves fall, blue turns to gray, snow covers the ground, and I should not write bad poetry. These are things you think of going to the doctor at my age to get blood drawn. It’s enough to give you a temporary hypertensive alarm. I was presented a mental health survey to complete while waiting for results, where I intimated that I may be a desperate man.

Irritable? Every day. Forlorn at least half the time. Sometimes close to despondent.

What rational person locked up for the past seven months fearing a virus enshrouded in a cone of state secrecy does not suffer the Michelle Obama blues?

Living in the USA has been a real drag lately. A maniac, or at least a narcissistic oaf, occupies the Oval Office. Armed men in Hawaiian shirts threaten to subvert civil order. Not wearing a face mask is considered around these parts a sign of macho. The number of Covid cases has been rising non-stop, and assaults on our democratic institutions are relentless. “Lock them all up!” Trump bellows to the sheep.

That’s what drives the former first lady to admit that she feels a little down.

The doctor sympathized. After all, she has borne the burden of a halo on her head supporting a plastic face shield day after day treating people with bad coughs, bad attitudes and worse. My vitals looked good. No heart attack was in the offing. Triglycerides were spot on. I know I should quit smoking.

Her mom is sort of conservative from a small town and her dad is sort of liberal from a college town so she is sort of moderate and shares my concerns. Can’t we just all get along as her parents did? What has happened to us?

I took a rain check on anti-depressants. They have seen survey scores far worse than mine. Plus, relief really is just around the corner.

In just 15 days, my heart and the bookies in England say that Joe Biden will be elected president — a 90% chance, according to the boys who follow the horses. The polls tend to back it up. Biden has a slight lead in Iowa and Ohio, and healthy advantages in Michigan and Wisconsin. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who has been among Trump’s craven enablers, is in serious trouble what with not knowing the price of beans during her most recent debate.

Trump has undermined the rule of law, sold out our national security interests, and conducted his affairs as if it were a Viking orgy. Everything I was taught in school about the promise of equal opportunity in America has been turned on its head.

But look at the huge turnouts already in Atlanta and Houston — people of color are lining up to vote across America following a summer of peaceful protests. In part, the lines are long because Republican governors are trying to make voting difficult. Yet they persist. Nobody will deny them their vote this year, and Black women in particular are not taking it for granted. God bless them. Trump is down in the polls by seven points in Georgia, not seen since Jimmy Carter’s days.

People have been taking back their democracy all year while cooped up and kept apart, amazingly. They show up at parking lot rallies in Northwest Iowa to listen to J.D. Scholten campaign for Congress on the FM dial. In Wisconsin last summer, people defied the virus and waited for hours to vote in a key state supreme court case that was a proxy for Trump-Biden; the Trump justice lost. We knew then that the political calculus definitely had changed. The deaths in Kenosha only steeled badger resolve to dig in and transform America into what it should be — and most know that Biden gets it.

We can get this virus under control with a coherent strategy. People are coming around to it. Biden offers people a way to put down their political defenses without losing face. His primary call is for national unity and rebuilding America, not a civil war. Voters yearn to turn their swords into plowshares.

The doctor hopes that we will have an effective vaccine in hand by summer. She, too, prays for an end to government by chaos. After sitting alone wondering if it is just you thinking this way, it was good to hear the woman behind the plastic telling me I am not that crazy, and that I should live long enough to see this rascal run off from the Rose Garden. America taking back its democracy is a sure cure to what’s ailing me and most of us. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I might take her up on the anti-depressants before I start to write a metaphorical stanza about winter.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of his day job at *The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times* (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland,” recently released in paperback. A version of this column appeared in The Guardian US.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020

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