Missing Family, Missing Hope

“I left my heart in San Francisco. High on a hill, it calls to me. To be where little cable cars climb half way to the stars, the morning fog may chill the air. I don’t care. My love waits there…”
–-Tony Bennett

I am so desperate to see our children during this pandemic that I have resorted to looking up our sons’ addresses in San Francisco and standing outside their apartments on Google Earth. Is that crazy? I so long to be with family right now. Are you feeling that way too?

Ours sons are planning to come visit us in Spain at Christmas time but I am not hopeful this will happen. Right now, Americans are banned from coming to Europe. Plus the virus is out of control in the US. There are over 4 million cases there and close to 150,000 deaths. It’s no time to visit, even though my heart longs to go there and spend some time with our sons and their girlfriends.

I so want to be hopeful and not pessimistic facing this pandemic but the news from the US is especially discouraging right now and has been for months. That is what happens when you elect someone incapable of rising to the occasion, someone who doesn’t take responsibility for anything and blames everyone else for the grave problems facing the nation. When Trump was interviewed recently by Chris Wallace of Fox News, Wallace asked him what he wants to be remembered for as president. In other words, what were his accomplishments? He replied not by listing any accomplishments but by saying, “I have been treated so unfairly.” So now he wants us to pity him because he was treated so unfairly? What about the Hispanic children and babies separated from their parents at the border and put into cages? Don’t they deserve our sympathy rather than the person who directed such an inhuman policy to be implemented in the first place?

I am 64 years old now and never in my life have I felt so despondent about my beloved country. Yes, I was upset with the string of assassinations that took place there in my youth, including JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The War in Vietnam was also a catastrophe. My cousin, an only child of a divorced mother, served as a medic during that war. He was killed there, at the Battle of Khe Sanh, on April 1st, 1968. So that one hit home, especially when my aunt took her own life in response to her much-loved son’s pointless death. These were all painful experiences.

But what is different now is the silence, especially from Republican politicians as our country veers out of control with paramilitary units patrolling Portland in search of «anarchists.» Are these politicians really okay with Trump’s lies, his cruelty, his incompetence and total devotion to self-interest? Trump wants children back in schools so their parents can go back to work and he can get re-elected on a revived economy, not because he gives a damn about anyone elses’ safety.

Trump is the great divider-in-chief, not a person of good moral character who will work hard to unite the country to effectively fight this pandemic. I don’t need to be a psychic to foresee much more emotional and economic pain ahead for millions of Americans, including for two young men in the city by the bay who are much missed by their bereft mother.