I got woken up by the storm this morning. It was howling out there, raging through the darkness, throwing rain at the window, chucking wheelie bins up and down the street. I was lying in bed listening and worrying. What would happen if one of our fence posts cracked up and smashed a neighbour’s windscreen? Is that covered by our home insurance? Is the roof of the shed okay? What about the side gate? What would I do if rain started pouring in through the ceiling or the window suddenly shattered?
I tried to think about literally anything else. The wind, the skirting whip of Storm Eowyn and her handfuls of icy rain were too loud for me to go back to sleep.
It’s interesting how it happened. All that cold air that was over Washington DC and New York and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard kind of pushed its way over the Atlantic, eventually creating its own low pressure anticyclone - Storm Eowyn. So you could say that the reason why the 47th President’s inauguration had to be held indoors on Monday… was also the exact thing that kept me awake worrying.
Who’d have thought it - Trump led to a night of sleepless worry. Unbelievable.
For a lot of people though, the new Prez is not for worrying about at all, but ought to be celebrated! Honoured, revered even! Not just over there in the States either! I mean here! Seems there are a few pockets of people cock-a-hoop that this straight-talking action-man is going to absolutely tick off their wish list. I get it. I’m fascinated. But I’m not quite so sure.
Life, I thought to myself in the stormy early hours, is supposed to be nuanced. Sometimes it feels as though we just don’t want to stop and look at the context before we repost or share something. The nuance is missing. And I think that might be the most dangerous thing of all, because the echo-chamber then reverberates with this spectacularly bad/great thing someone said or did. But you can’t judge it properly without the full picture - it’s already been spun - tribalism continues, and with it the reinforcing of extreme views. And that man, like him or loathe him, isn’t exactly nuanced.
The room grew light eventually and I creaked up to take a look out of the window. Sunlight, weak but true was already soothing the world after the storm. Perhaps that’s how those people feel? Like sunlight in the Oval Office, springtime after a dreadful liberal winter.
The day’s uncertain though isn’t it? And uncertainty is itself nuance - the potential for things to go any number of ways, and worse perhaps, to be interpreted through a lens I don’t think I can bring myself to look through.
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