That Dark Hum in the Background

A beautiful summer day on the Rhode Island waterfront had an eerie vibe, as we watched all the loving families at play... most of them with tan or brown skin.

I’m writing this from the Amtrak train that recently left Providence, RI, and I will be getting off shortly at Penn Station in NYC, which is close to my home.

For five days, I visited my dear friend Lynda, and for four of them, I was profoundly ill. Such is life with cancer. But we had one great day yesterday, during which we went to a gorgeous state park in the area, which is simply enormous, located on a lovely stretch of New England coastline that looks like a postcard. (My not naming this park is deliberate; you'll soon read why.)

There were families everywhere that had set up all types of cookout camps, facilitated by the park’s gas barbecue grills and picnic tables. Some families were so large, in fact, that they looked like family reunions. But what they also looked like were targets, as nearly 90 percent of them had skin color that was not white, which cast an eerie mood across everything in sight, despite the beautiful sun, the clear sea, and the abundant life and love all around us.

Profiling may soon be legal in California, thanks to Trump. So if you might look Latino, that’s grounds for detainment. (Image from my Covid Journal, 2020.)

As Lynda and I sat eating our lemon ice, saying hello to nearly all passersby, we began to discuss that dark looming in the background that we’re all feeling now nearly every day - that creepy underpinning of something taking hold that is only going to get worse as ICE’s $170 billion budget begins to sprawl into a new and cruel bureaucracy, the purpose of which is to once again make the white male the master of all… of non-white people, of the halls of power, of women.

When we came home and lingered over dinner, we admitted that the sickening sadness, disgust and rage were hard to shake, mainly the rage. We agreed that we didn’t know what to do with it, which was only half true. We know precisely what we want to do with it, but that would involve going to a place mentally that neither one of us can think about, at least not yet.

Curiously, we chose to watch the Netflix film “The Penguin Lessons” last night, about an English professor (played wonderfully by Steve Coogan) teaching at a boys’ school in Argentina during the ‘70s, when that country was living under its own authoritarian rule. Yes, this true story was a charming one about this teacher’s unlikely friendship with a penguin, but it was also a disturbing one, as the backdrop was one much like what we’re living with now in America in 2025.

As the teacher tries to remain removed from the politics of a country that was not his own, once he began to care for the cleaning lady and her 19-year-old granddaughter, who soon becomes arrested, he could no longer stay silent and a different aspect of the story unfolds. In various scenes, we see the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo marching in the streets with photos of their lost children, demanding to know where they went after arrest. When all was said and done seven years later, after the fall of the regime, 30,000 Argentinians had gone missing, never to be seen again.

As I ride on this train, I can feel my illness getting worse, and I wonder how many more of these visits I’ll have in me, yet my own suffering seems so insignificant compared to the staggering losses that are to come in America. This is the malaise we are all feeling — the dread, the sadness, and again that seething rage. It’s hard to guess how this will all turn out.

I want my college-age nieces to live in peace and freedom as I did, to have the same reproductive choices that I had, to speak truth to power without a second thought, as was always my right.

But it’s all being threatened now by white men too cowardly to live in a world where they must compete and be the best they can be if they want to succeed. Like the old days, they don’t want to be challenged by those with other skin colors or by the opposite sex.

Well, I may have cancer, but I still have a big mouth. And I still have an intelligent brain. And when pressed, I can be just as conniving as the cowards. Those people in the park will live free, as will my nieces, and that’s that. I'm not exactly sure what this resistance will look like in the coming years (and it will take years to undo this mess), but I fully suspect it will get violent, and soon. Terrible things are going to happen before this is all over, and I'm sickened by the thought. But it will have to happen, especially when Trump stops the midterms, and you know he will.

I wish to God I was healthy enough to protest, but all I can do right now is write resistance songs. (They’ll be released shortly.)

Writing music seems so insignificant, but every heroic movement needs a soundtrack, right? I’m doing my dogged best to make that happen.

-end-

And wait! What’s this strange looking audio file below?

Wow! It’s my new song “PUSH,” which will be released in a few weeks! (One of my non-political tunes — release date TBA.) I’d love to know what you think!

PUSH by Mary Ann Farley