Week #8: Disillusionment
It’s Monday, July 15th, 2024. Coming out of this past weekend, I am feeling a lot of mixed emotions. About America. About India. About what I could possibly be doing to try and make things feel more ok than they do right now, at this moment, in the immediate future, in the far-off future. I don’t know what to think. I don’t really know what to feel. I don’t even really understand what it is that I’m feeling, all I know is that I’m feeling a lot and that I need to try and make sense of it all. My mind is lost in a cacophony of thoughts and emotions and images and sounds, and I need to be able to rise far enough above the din within myself to try and obtain some greater clarity.
First, India. I went into this weekend already with a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach. Two realities, two Indias have been bouncing around my head a lot this past week. The first India is one of plenty, one of exuberance and excess and the type of wealth that just seems to exude off of a person, oozing dollars and cents the way that an Olympic runner secretes sweat at the end of a big race. This past week, my office has been abuzz with news and talk and general chatter over the culmination of the wedding between Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant. It’s the type of event that I can only compare to the hype surrounding royal weddings in the United Kingdom, or perhaps the Superbowl in the United States if the players were better dressed and Rihanna and Justin Bieber were both in attendance not to perform at any halftime show, but to shower the participants with gifts and praise. From what I have come to understand, neither of the newlyweds obtained wealth or fame on their own accord; the groom is described by CNN as the “son of India’s richest man,” worth 122 billion dollars, while the bride has been labeled a “pharmaceutical heiress.” The festivities and celebrations surrounding this wedding have been going on for seven months; a lavish “event” is said to have occurred at least once every six weeks beginning in January to mark the happy occasion.
I hear all this, all this gossip that my coworkers are eating up and spending energy talking about, as maybe well they should. Lord knows that I am guilty of my own escapist tendencies; they make life fun, and I, as an American, am certainly not in a place to be shutting down celebrations of excess. My very culture is one of excess, excess is what America is, what it always has been, what America is built upon, what it champions, celebrates, reviles, reveres, concedes to, condones. No, I have no ground to stand on when it comes to exciting oneself over excess. Still, these images that I see surrounding this wedding, I cannot get them to square up with a second India that I have become far more familiar with in the weeks that I have been here.
I think back to something else that I witnessed earlier in the week when I was traveling to work in an auto when my driver and I were stopped at a traffic light. Up ahead, on a dirty, dusty street corner, was a man in tattered clothing begging for money. The man was not standing upright, but laying down, crawling around on his hands and knees in the middle of the road. His legs were shriveled and stick-thin, and he wore oversized slippers not on his feet but on his knees; I suspect this was out of necessity to try and protect himself from the excessive heat radiating off of the asphalt on this particular 100-degree day. Watching this man, I almost didn’t notice a boy, maybe around eight years old, approach my auto with his hands held out, asking me for money. I had heard previously from those who would be in a position to know such things that many of these children work for others as professional beggars, whom their manipulators and abusers use to generate sympathy on the part of passersby to extract the rupees that line their pockets. Still, I cannot say for certain whether I told the child that I didn’t carry any cash on me (a lie) for this particular reason or because I couldn’t bear to face the sadness that I felt looking at him a second longer than I had to. I think that this question will linger in my soul for some time to come.
All of these thoughts and feelings were swirling around inside me even before I heard the news yesterday morning (IST) that Donald Trump had been shot. I was awake at 4:00 in the morning for reasons unbeknownst even to myself when I happened to glance down at my phone to see a text from an American friend reading, “Call me ASAP when you wake up.” My mind raced, wondering what could have happened to him, and fearing the worst, I quickly picked up the phone to find out. I would never have predicted in a thousand years that the words to come out of my friend's mouth were going to be, “Trump was just shot in Pennsylvania.”
I don’t know in the twenty-four hours or so since the incident occurred whether I have been particularly worried or grieving for Donald Trump the man; anyone who knows me well knows that I have very little love for the former President, and I don’t particularly want to delve into the depths of my feelings towards him any more than that. No, what I think, if I am being emotionally honest with myself, that I have been grieving throughout the past day’s events is the volatile state that my country has found itself in. A man was shot at, almost killed, survived an assassination attempt, and my first thoughts upon hearing the news were not for his safety or the wellbeing of his family or those around him; my first thoughts went directly towards the political ramifications surrounding the event. I don’t like this. I don’t like this about myself. I don’t like that these were the first thoughts that permeated my mind, that I have been obsessing about in the hours since. And the worst part of it all is that I don’t really know what to do about it. To be an American of my generation at this particular moment in time, I think, is to some extent always be living and breathing and feeling the politics of the era, feeling it embed itself in the marrow of your bones. It’s the flip side of hope in some ways, that ugly underbelly that occasionally rears its head when you care so much and so deeply about something and want, with every fiber of your being, for things to turn out okay. That’s what I want for America right now, more than anything; it’s what I want for myself, for my friends, family, and loved ones. I want for things to feel ok, to feel more ok than they do right now. And I’m so angry. I’m so angry that they don’t. I’m angry at the Republicans. I’m angry at the Democrats. I’m angry at the former President; at the current President. At Congress. At the Supreme Court. At the boomers. At my own generation. I’m so angry that I cannot find a way to make things better. That’s what I want to be doing in this moment. And I’m angry that I can’t.
I don’t know how to explain these conflicting feelings to my coworkers over in India who have been asking me the past several hours. I don’t even know if I have done an appropriate job of explaining myself here, to you, in this moment. But these are the things that I’m feeling. And I think that I need to feel them, and feel them right now and in the days and weeks to come.
- Tyler Brooks, 7/15/2024