Since getting out of rehab, my life has become more circumscribed and my connection with the outside world more limited. I still hobble out to my neighborhood café for a bagel and latte most mornings—sometimes with a caring aide. Also, I continue to write essays and film reviews for publication and have gone out with my wife a couple of times to New York Film Festival press screenings, both of us exhilarated seeing a powerful political film from the often-imprisoned fine Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who now lives in exile. But I continue to feel diminished, unable to phone most of my friends, fearful that I have lost much of my autonomy and have become fragile and dependent on being helped to do many of my daily activities.
Sometimes I leave the café and, seated on my walker, observe the stream of racially diverse New York University students passing by and long to feel young again. I want to simply be able to walk without having to rest every block and to reflect what it would be like starting life anew with a sense of innumerable options. But I know that is just a fantasy, like naively believing that the Trump era is merely a nightmare from which we will all soon wake up. Each day he tosses off angry and cruel asides—he is a monster of resentment, a modern day Caligula—and issues executive decrees that are personally vindictive, abusive, and repressive, that threaten democracy and are racist in nature. I see and read many of the existing critical voices, but the fact that Trump still has 40 percent of the population supporting him and a craven and opportunistic Republican Party willing to submit to anything he suggests does not bode well. There is also a corrupt and reactionary Supreme Court that is willing to find legal justifications for much of his misrule and his blatant rejection of the Constitution. The opposition must become more courageous so that the erosion of democracy is stalled and some of our political liberties are preserved until the next election. At my age and given my physical limitations, I can do little but write these words.
Just looking through The New York Times daily, I read that Trump is punishing New York for the shutdown of Congress with the White House freezing billions of dollars in federal funding for the long-delayed Hudson River rail tunnel and phase two of the Second Avenue subway. And he has decided to take million in cuts from grants awarded to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to combat terrorism on the city’s subway, buses, and commuter rail. That is just one abominable act among many. No point cataloguing them all, but I will mention a few of the more egregious ones. This week, there was a massive immigration raid on Chicago’s South Side in which adults and children were dragged from their apartments screaming and crying. I suppose that is Trump’s contribution to fighting urban crime. President Trump has also threatened to fire top military officers who disagree with him. In addition, the cartoon Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told an audience of generals and admirals that the military had decayed. He announced new fitness and grooming standards. I shudder to think what competent and professional personnel are left to guard our national security. I am glad I have reached 86—I know the alternative is worse—and I still can embrace the happy moments that are predictably rare.
