"Food Poisoning and Politics"

 

2016-Peaceful protest in San Antonio, Texas

  Last Tuesday, my psyche took a full-frontal attack that left me dazed throughout the week.  I arrived home shell-shocked after a rough day at work. One look at me, and my son suggested we eat out for dinner instead of settling for Plain Jane meatloaf. 
  Desiring to give myself a boost, I proposed that we try a new restaurant that had opened recently just around the corner. My nephew thought it would be fun to join us, and so we waited for my husband’s 5:30 arrival before heading out.
  David grabbed the first available parking spot as we could see that the new place already did a booming business. Our chippie waitress highlighted her personal favorites, and we decided to begin our meal with fried pickles paired with a Ranch Dressing and the restaurant’s special blend.
  By 1:30 AM, I knew the wrenching intestinal pain that wracked though my body could only be food poisoning. Some tiny microbe sent my entire gut into “Warning! Warning! WARNING!” alarms. That toxin, no matter how minute, drove my system into protective hyper-drive. 
  For the next seventeen hours, I flushed out every sweet potato French fry, fried pickle with Ranch dressing, and burger bit that lingered in my stomach and intestines.
  My body defenses knew to purge this danger.
  It responded rapidly to the threat.
  It won.
  And while this germ battle raged within, I barely noticed national events. My peripheral senses picked up another visceral response occurring, but on a massive scale. As protests grew, my foggy brain toggled through Facebook and Twitter feeds, and I realized many Americans simply don’t understand the psychological and sociological necessity for hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets to protest against an election they know they cannot change.  
  Protest in our country is not unpatriotic.
  Protest is not the product of childish, whining people who need to “put on their big boy pants” and “grow-up.”
  Protest provides our political “bodies” one way of purging something harmful and dangerous.
         For many of us, the placement of someone like Trump into the White House represents the beginning of an infestation of venomous mindsets. We know our election process put this man into power. We know we’ll honor the change because this transfer of power is one of the fundamental strengths of our country and the Constitution.
          But, like my gut forcing out poison, the discord of protest can possibly end with a cleansing.



Copyright 2016 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

   

"Defeated"

 Whenever our world takes a dive into nastiness, my optimistic nature turns mulish. I pep talk myself into believing things will improve since I cannot imagine anyone would plunge our society into darkness. Who chooses politicians spewing hateful philosophies over ones espousing tolerance? Who supports dogmas that foster divisiveness over creeds that call for unity? Who supports a legal system that demoralizes the victim and worships the criminal?  Who willingly supports doctrines that leave citizens battered, bloodied and dead?

     My logical brain cannot comprehend that other people foolishly make decisions based upon emotional rhetoric instead of factual evidence. When I hear these people speak about their “gut feelings” that guide their judgments, my own stomach twists into knots. They add into the mix the prejudices of their religions, biases of their socio-economic class, and abhorrence to all that appears different from themselves, and end up with infectious hatred. 

  Applying heat to this festering hostility will bring things to a head. But can we withstand  this first step in treatment?

  I long to lance these boils, push out the pus that poisons and destroys, and slather on purifying, healing balms. In my optimism, I envision scenarios of miraculously curing our diseased nation. Yet, I fear that the contagion runs too deep, and all I feel is defeated.

Copyright 2016 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman