No longer at ease… –TS Eliott The Journey of the Magi

I walked into a market in Redwood City in search of a normal drink to quench my thirst. Wasn’t looking for anything exotic or one pretending to be healthy. Just kind of regular. What I encountered was completely disorienting. I didn’t see Coke or Pepsi, nor Fanta, 7 Up, Canada Dry or A&W. I felt I was losing my bearings, becoming dizzily disconnected and visibly disconcerted.
It was a shocking experience. I had every expectation of normalcy, of being able to walk into a market, see something recognizable, buy it and drink it. But not this day and not in this market. I was a Southern Californian and a “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

The times I’ve felt out of place in the world have never been in foreign cultures but in returning to my country and culture and found it changed and somehow foreign. I wasn’t disoriented in my year in Vienna—a year of real change and adjustments. Learning to be on my own in a very foreign culture was an adjustment.

Living with another language and encountering the challenge of not being highly articulate but having to circumloquate and guess at words to get my point across, was both challenging and fun. But it didn’t fundamentally alienate me or make me feel like a fish out of water.

Nor was I particularly in “Culture shock,” when I lived in Tunisia for two years—teaching English for the Peace Corps. Again with a foreign language—actually two: Arabic and French. Sure, it felt exotic at times—particularly the first time I stepped in camel caca next to my home. “Damn,” I thought at first, but then i realized that this was pretty special and would remain in my memory banks longer than on my sandals.

As a guest in two nations, I rapidly adjusted to different rules regarding social space, modesty, political discourse and the limits of my free speech. I loved these new experiences and felt quite comfortable.

Culture shock hit when I came home. Returning from Vienna and adjusting to the anti-war movement and some fairly open rebellion against our government was hard. Coming home from the Peace Corps was even harder. I returned not to USC where I’d done my undergraduate degree but to rebellion central, Berkeley.

I’d left the states thinking of myself as a liberal (which I still do) but in Berkeley in 1969 I was perceived as quite conservative. I was confused. I had returned from the Peace Corps with increased patriotism—a respect for American intentions, if not always American policies.

But I didn’t recognize my country. I could get behind the anti-war protests but not the pseudo revolutionary rhetoric and some violent exhortations from radicals. OK, sometimes the radicals were funny without meaning to be.
I heard lots of Marxism from people who’d never read Marx save Groucho. There was a lot of posing but also some interesting people with hopes that ran the spectrum from idealistic to naïve to monstrous. In Berkeley (1969) I often felt like a fish out of water.

Today this fish has long been out of once calm waters with once survivable temperatures. These waters roil and boil as I gasp longing for the comforts of calm, ordinary and normal.

Today it’s not an antiwar movement that confuses me or the civil rights struggle that has to be fought again that discourages me. It’s America.

It our government that works to destroy itself. It’s our president who cannot stay on message or policy (Good or Bad) but flits from position to position, from one assertion of fact and statement of values to their very opposite. If my critics accuse me of being confused, I readily, though tearfully, confess.

Once upon a time, I could agree or disagree with an American policy and still believe that I was on the same side with a common vison but only different paths to truth, justice and what we thought was the American way. I believed in our good hearts and competence.

I could never have envisioned a convicted felon as president, a cabinet secretary trying to explain Habeas corpus and not having a clue what she was talking about, a Secretary of Health who didn’t believe in vaccines and undermined life-saving public health research and programs. I could never have imagined a Republican Party that would fall so in the thrall of a president that they could abandon a long-time ally and cleave unto Putin and Russia.

Women’s choice under attack. Civil rights reversed. Ecology laws rescinded or ignored. The judiciary threatened and judges arrested. The Dept of Justice becoming a tool for a single client: The President. Our universities being threatened with loss of grants and even their tax exemptions if they don’t discipline as per the president’s desires and hire and fire according to the president’s whims.

Who are we? Where am I? It’s not, I guess the soft drinks that threw me. It’s…it’s, well everything. I no longer recognize my country. I feel like a stranger in a strange land. As much as I have been at ease and comfortable with many social struggles, today I am no longer at ease.

I remember when Coca Cola attempted to replace its old formula and tried to sell us New Coke. We the People would have none of it.

Well, the MAGA plan for my country is the social version of New Coke, and I reject it. Yes, I want normal, but normal won’t return by itself. We the People must again rise up and be heard.