It’s almost 2pm on a Thursday afternoon and I’m still in my pajamas (flannel with Peanuts characters, if you’re wondering).  There are dishes in the sink, laundry to be folded, unopened bills to be sorted and paid, all along with the hundreds of miscellaneous things in my too-big house that need to be put away or at least put somewhere else.  I have not exercised today, which you could probably infer from the PJ fact above and also tells you all you need to know about my 2018 resolution to exercise JUST A LITTLE BIT, EVEN every day.  I have errands to run — if I don’t refill my trazadone prescription today, I will definitely be able to add”crappy night” to tomorrow’s list of things undone. And I think the pilot light on our heater is out, a not inconsequential thing in the deep freeze of the northeastern United States where it is currently 29 degrees but, per The Weather Channel, “feels like 19.”

On the plus side, I have fed the cats and cleaned the litter boxes, breakfasted, had my coffee, and read the paper.

Let’s face it:  it could be worse.  All in all, I think 2018 is going OK so far.

It’s not 2017, for one thing.  As you probably noticed from my radio silence, when you see the black dogs of your depression loosed upon the entire country . . . it’s daunting.  I’m pretty well medicated, but the drugs just adjust your brain chemicals so that they don’t screw up your ability to constructively figure out what you’re doing here on this earth.  They don’t actually figure it out for you.  Unfortunately.

I spent a lot of time last year not doing the work — sleeping late, reading formulaic spy novels (kind of like peanut M&Ms for your brain), playing Spider Solitaire on my phone (I’m still holding that against you, Isabel W.!), leafing through catalogs, and watching HGTV and QVC.  I’m sad about the state of American democracy, my last child going off to college, and the incivility of our national discourse.  I’m worried about my health, the repairs the we should be doing on our 100+-year-old house, global warming and the loss of bats and bees.

Several years ago, back when we thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the re-election of George W. Bush, my friend Liz gave me a book called,  “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear.”  It’s a collection of essays edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.  (Just as relevant today as it was in 2004. Check it out for yourself.) I’ve been re-reading one by Jim Hightower, a former Texas state official and currently “America’s #1 Populist” (Self proclaimed, I believe) called “Rebellion is What Built America.”

Hightower writes:  “Of course it’s hard to battle the bastards! So what’s new?  History — and certainly the history of our country — is the story of people struggling, always going uphill against the powerful to seek a little more democracy, a tad more justice, a slightly wider sliver of the economic pie. . . . The Man, The Machine — by whatever name, the establishment is not in the giveaway business.  Striving for democracy is bone-wearying, agonizing, frustrating, cruel, bloody, and often deadly work.”  He quotes Ibsen ” ‘You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth’,” pointing out that he didn’t mean “we should stay home and press our trousers, rather that we should gird up accordingly and go forth into the fray.”

Hightower reminds us, “Those who came before us risked all of their property, their reputations, their freedom, and their lives to push the boundaries of democracy for us,” citing Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays of Shays’s Rebellion in 1780, suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, the Grimke sisters and others, American labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood, A. Philip Randolph, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the struggle for civil rights which “started when the first slave was put on a boat to America.”  Few, if any, of these movement leaders, Hightower emphasizes, lived to see the successes they hoped for and envisioned.

But, he says, “Inhale a bit of our country’s pungent, brawling, inspiring history of grassroots rebels, then tell me that battling the bastards today is too hard, too uphill, or takes too long. What else are you doing that is more worthy of your efforts than trying to establish the moral principles of fairness, justice, and equality for all in our America?”

The essay ends with this: “The important thing to know is that you are wanted.  You are needed.  You are important.  You are not only what democracy counts on, you are what democracy is.”  [Emphasis mine.]

I think I should go get dressed.