Tomorrow we will drop off Joe Pye at our nearby kennel as we cross the state to Crex Meadows to hopefully enjoy some peace with Sandhill Cranes. Tomorrow is our mid-term elections, perhaps the most important election in the history of our nation. At least in my lifetime. Tomorrow I will seek peace and comfort away from the news be it welcoming or not and I cannot allow the promise of a “blue wave” deter my desire. Yes, I remember the predictions, including my own, back in 2016, and how did that turn out?
Tomorrow is a day of hopeful reckoning, a break from this stranglehold of political and governing ugliness. Will our state and nation seek to rid our national government of an apparent Nazi grip on the throats of goodwill and neighborliness? Will our state retain what is referred to as being “blue” or will it sink into this cesspool found beyond our borders to the south and west?
In 2016 there was a fear of what might happen, and the mood on election night was something I have never wished to ever experience again in my lifetime. Two years ago it happened again. Tomorrow I will escape with hopes of a better universe than one we’re living in today.
Two years ago in November, on the afternoon following the election, I left the house in search of calm waters. Nature surely helped for the wetlands and waterways were all ripple free, an antidote to what I was feeling inside. I needed that for my soul, and now, after two years of what has happened to our government and the citizens of this country since, I find a need to once again escape. I know of few places like Crex Meadows, some 30,000 acres of marshy wetlands and many species of birds. Swans. Geese and ducks. And of course, the sandhills. So tomorrow we will cross the state and the Wisconsin border to clear our minds of six years of MAGA turmoil along with this past year of eventual hope and promise. Stakes this high might be more than I can handle at this age. So I’ll escape.
I find it nearly impossible to explain to my friends and neighbors the differences in mood and comfort we found just a few weeks ago as we traveled through three European countries and into Norway. There the laughter was easy. Faces were calm. Smiles were quick and genuine. All seemed welcoming, and yes, we faced questions on how our lives in America … or, should I simply say “the States” … have changed since 2016, and especially over the past two years. Those Minneapolis ICE murders were remembered. NATO. Tariffs. The list continues.
I fear we have become adapters despite the numerous protests that have been held, many of which we’ve attended. We seem to have universally adapted to the MAGA realm of turmoil and ugliness in such ways that it seems like we’ve entered a new normal, a normal I have difficulty accepting.
Yet, is there anything normal about our lives since 2024? Of a government who murders its own citizens, or captured workers off streets, roofs and factory lines or children from schools to either imprison them in inhumane cells halfway across the country before shipping them to countries where they will face either imprisonment, torture or death? Where the former balances between branches of government has been thoroughly eroded by years of imbalance, where a Supreme Court has been stacked with the Nazi sympathizers by an enabling Congress and a cheering White House? Where Christianity has been hijacked by a most racist and non-Jesus “believers,” a “christianity” our nation was warned to avoid in the 1950s by President Eisenhower and in the early 1960s by conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater? Where idiotic tariffs have not penalized foreign countries so much as our very own citizens to a point of near bankruptcy? A war no one wanted, not the financial and weaponry gifts to a murderous regime in Israel? That there are still candidates running for federal and state political offices while championing the convicted felon now serving our nation’s highest political office?
Yes, I need Crex Meadows and I need the sandhills. I need to hear their “trumpets in the orchestra of evolution,” as naturalist Aldo Leopold so beautifully described their unique call; a call that beckons me to Central Nebraska and the broad Platte River each spring, and to both Crex and Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge through the months of summer and autumn. I can hardly wait to hear those bugles upon bugles, that geologically-aged chorus echoing across those seemingly endless acres of shallow pools and marshy meadows. That is my wish and desire, not another day of more blatant and ugly television advertisements where the ugliness of the human spirit knows no bounds regardless of political party,
Can we once again gather as families and love one another without having Fox divisions? Can this mental “civil war” come to a crashing halt? Can we have a government “by the people and for the people” regardless of race and gender? Can we love our neighbors? Those next door? Those across the border? Those across the oceans? Does diplomacy have to depend on making the Trumps and his billionaire boosters richer?
I want calm waters. I want humanity to erase this ugliness that trumpets the airwaves be it television or radio. I wish for strong public education and an end to voter restrictions. I dream for universal health care where families aren’t forced into bankruptcy by an unexpected emergency. I dream of an end to Citizens United. I desire acceptance and kindness, something that has been mostly eradicated through these years of MAGA “trumpism.”
I can almost hear the bugles from the marshy meadows, and see those flights of so much grace and beauty, of a glimpse of nature that beckons and soothes the soul. A year ago this week we were at Crex during a full moon, although it seems we’re destined to visit in the midst of a grayish curtain of rain. It really makes no difference as long as we have the birds and the dwindling colors of autumn, a peacefulness and, yes, calm waters. Perhaps naturalist and essayist John Burroughs put it best when he wrote, “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” Amen!
Perhaps by the following day, again on a Wednesday as it was two years ago with my need of calming waters, there will be a sense of healing, of a backlash and a vote for a more peaceful and forgiving presence than I now feel on this day before a most important election perhaps in the history of our nation. May that peacefulness arrive with the grace of a Sandhill Crane alighting from flight, easing down into a marsh of calm waters.
