Loose

Inspirational song: Crumblin' Down (John Mellencamp)

A few hours ago, I heard a guy on TV compare how rapidly the news cycles have rolled over each other this week, how dramatically different the end of the week was from the beginning, to when the Berlin Wall fell thirty years ago. That description has stuck with me. It's absolutely perfect. I remember being equally stunned at that time, as a young adult, watching the Wall come down. I was pregnant then, and I remember watching the news at my mother's house, imagining how things would be different for the baby waiting to be born. The world was suddenly unfamiliar and scary and more hopeful than I could ever remember in my young life at that time. The Berlin Wall had stood since long before I was born, and I could barely imagine that there was ever a unified Berlin before it, much less a unified Germany. Tonight's analogy pointed out that Berliners were afraid even to approach the wall a week before it fell. There were deadly consequences for trying to cross it without proper authority. But all of a sudden, citizens swarmed it. Then they climbed it. Within hours, they were taking pickaxes to it, tearing it down with their very hands.

For the last three years, an awful lot of people in government have been cowed into keeping some very big secrets. They were hiding bad behavior, and that is the kind of thing that burns people up from the inside. Keeping secrets like that is untenable in the long term, especially if someone is burying that sort of thing for someone else whom they might not actually like or respect. Leaks have been dripping out of the current administration all this time, true, but there was so much more under lock down. The analogy I'm thinking of now is when I've cooked something in my Instant Pot, and I come along and poke the release valve in a staccato pattern, until I feel like it's safe to flip it all the way open. Steam pops out in puffs but never actually takes the pressure off. Then once the valve is locked open, it hisses out in a cloud so huge I worry the sudden burst of humidity will delaminate my kitchen cabinets. In the last three or four days, some trigger has popped open the pressure release valve in Washington, and all the buried demons are hissing out in a cloud of steam.

I don't know where things will go from here. No one does, really. I'm fascinated to see what happens, though. I expect to be stunned, disappointed, angered, thrilled, saddened, and maybe even a little scared at the prospect of being thrust into the unknown. But never bored. Not at all. I'll watch the walls tumble down with nihilistic glee.