Bangkok Post – I never panic, but I’m panicking now

For over a month, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it disappeared. It was expired and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed aside his insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly seemed urgent. She misplaces things all the time. It would happen, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump was returned to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was gripped by a sudden, cold panic thinking, “Where’s Mom’s passport?” What if the Trump administration makes good on its deportation promises and she suddenly has to prove that she is indeed a naturalized U.S. citizen? Did my frail 73-year-old mother have her papers in order if someone knocked on her door?

This feeling surprised me, much more than Mr. Trump’s victory, which was after all a possibility. I don’t want to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always exaggerated. Panic and worry: these are feelings that a life spent observing the world with an optimistic and journalistic eye, always with a long-term vision, has taught me to extinguish as soon as they arise. What purpose can such a strong emotion serve?

After all, we’ve been here before. Mr. Trump has already been president once, and while he managed to thwart a pandemic, most of us survived. He has never been more popular with voters, but even an uninspiring candidate like Joe Biden managed to defeat him in 2020.

Yet as I tried to regain that composure over the past two weeks, she stubbornly refused to show up. I have a feeling that many other people also feel abandoned by their more resilient selves, discovering instead a new and excruciating sense of vulnerability. The sensation only deepened as Mr. Trump’s cabinet announcements unfolded and his cruel political plans for grotesque deportation campaigns, vengeful lawsuits and reckless budget cuts emerged. Despite myself, I panic.

It’s hard not to wonder what clues I might have missed along the way. For example, why hadn’t I paid more attention to what my mother’s fixation on finding her passport might have told me? She was asking this question in part because she was considering returning to Ethiopia permanently in search of a lower cost of living. Like many Americans, she worries a lot about money. She lives on Social Security and veteran’s benefits that my father earned. Shopping is expensive, even for an elderly woman living alone who doesn’t have much of an appetite. The electric bill for his small apartment, his cable TV and the Internet: these things seem, as part of his meager income, incredibly expensive, not to mention the rising costs of medication.

Another blow came a few months ago when the giant corporation that owns the apartment complex where she lives raised her rent by almost 10 percent. When I saw the amount, I felt a wave of nausea. I assured him that, of course, my brothers and I would help him, but how could a person who did not have a well-off child and had no children of his own handle such a sudden increase and also brutal impact on the cost of something as essential as housing? And anyway, she hated the idea of ​​being a burden to her children. Looking now at its situation, especially in my neighborhood and in my city, in our country, in this world, I see that we are clearly on the wrong path.

Thinking about this election is a bit like looking at the sun. Fire blinds rather than enlightens. Especially in times of confusion and overwhelm, I have found it helpful to turn to similar but more distant stars for understanding. It is helpful to ask yourself: where did I see this particular shade of light? When did I feel the burn of this particular form of heat?

My mind immediately flashed back to the first time I became fully aware of my own vulnerability, almost 20 years ago. I was 29 and had just started a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times in West Africa. Many of my friends in New York were envious because I was going abroad right after George W. Bush was re-elected, this time winning the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite the moral atrocity of the Iraq War and well other things.

But all this hardly crossed my mind. I was excited to start my dream job. I was so sheltered from worry thanks to my youthful cloak of invincibility that I brushed off strange things happening to my body. Usually I had a big appetite, but somehow I was never hungry. Despite this, my pants continued to get tighter even though my watch strap loosened. A sharp, stabbing pain shook my stomach as I crossed potholed streets.

One day at the beach, a woman congratulated me on my pregnancy. I wasn’t pregnant, but there was no denying that I looked like I was. Shaken by my complacency, I went to the doctor. A few days later, I was on a plane to New York, where I would be diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. It was a disease that usually struck much older women and I had no family history to explain its early onset. It was, my oncologist assured me, just pure luck.

Six months later, after surgery and chemotherapy, I returned to my dream job. But I had undoubtedly been changed by this experience. Once, I was almost not afraid of anything. Not recklessly, but through a cold, rational assessment of probabilities. I was once able to say, while boarding rickety commercial planes in poor countries, what are the chances that this plane will crash? I knew that traveling by road was, statistically speaking, much more dangerous. Cancer demolished this serenity. If this random and extremely unlikely diagnosis could happen to me, anything could. For a time, this fear was all-consuming and paralyzing. Eventually, I learned to incorporate this new uncertainty into my risk calculation and returned to my life and work.

What this experience taught me is that none of us knows the direction or speed of our vulnerability. Fortunately, this is unimaginable for us. The best scenario for the luckiest among us is a slight drift towards frailty and old age. We all die, in one way or another, and so does everyone we love. Fortunately, I remained cancer-free. I have been both extremely unlucky and incredibly lucky.

Mr. Trump’s victory feels like a diagnosis, even though Americans deeply disagree over whether he is the disease, the symptom or the cure. Anyone who has been confronted with mysterious symptoms knows that the diagnosis brings dark satisfactions, even or especially if the news is very bad. Cancer, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is a compelling metaphor for our current moment. If 2016 was a fluke, a lightning bolt akin to a freak accident, it seems systemic. What is cancer, after all, if not something mysterious and free that our own bodies construct within themselves?

America is on the verge of a radical treatment. My mother hoped that Kamala Harris’s promises to take on business owners, lower prescription drug prices, and protect Medicare and Social Security would help her live a better life. In the end, what appears to be, at best, a very slim majority of Americans decided to vote for Mr. Trump’s tough medicine.New York Times

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