A collision.
My wife was in a car accident today. I refrain from relating specific details at this time save to state the following basic and important facts:
- She is fine. The airbag deployed and the seatbelt held, causing what seem to be friction burns and bruises, but nothing was broken or bleeding. She has been discharged and supplied with powerful medicine.
- Our son was not in the car at the time.
- Our car may be totaled.
- Another driver was involved.
- This was not my wife’s fault.
And for the three hours between work and the train (and the train is going too slowly doesn’t it realize it is a train) and the hospital my mind is all steamed panic and memories of movies featuring Oscar nominees as widowers. My agnosticism has a crisis of itself as I imagine what entity I offended to enact such a penalty. I rewrite my routines cautiously optimistic that the tapestry does not have to be unraveled altogether. I ball-gag fear and let pragmatism have its way with me.
But she is fine. Scans and tests all came back with smiles and relief.
She’s fine, and my being relaxes just long enough to be angry again. At the driver who nearly killed her, of course, but my anger is a mutating virus and it leaps to my usual targets when it goes un-contained.
Because with the trauma behind me all I can think about are the politics and social changes that led to this situation and the way things were before. All I can think about are the well-dressed men on Capitol Hill sneering about corporate regulation and personal responsibility these past months ad nauseum.
The airbag and seatbelt that saved my wife, that saved my son’s mother, were put in that car by those who demanded that the auto industry sacrifice a portion of their profits to ensure the well-being of actual people. Those regulations were fought and delayed by the same sort of people who now gut clean air legislation with dull rusty knives and who squeal about communism when an outraged mass demands justice over an improperly managed oil derrick. They are the same sort of people who insist that the health insurance mandate upheld by the Supreme Court yesterday amounts to tyranny, who would rather watch my family and a thousand dozen other families slide into poverty and suicide after a stroke of bad fortune than see insurance company executives have to sacrifice their annual two weeks at Lake Tahoe, covered in hookers and iPhones.
Perhaps it is unseemly to take this moment of personal trauma and convert it into more of my usual sociopolitical firebranding. Perhaps I should just take a few deep breaths and be happy for the outcome I received rather than the one it could have been. Yes, perhaps I could do that.
But the political really is personal, for me, and I live in a country where a significant slice of the influence belongs to a smarmy, bullying death cult who believes that my gay friends are abominations, that my female friends are harlots, that my family are terrorist sympathizers, that my dogs are expendable, and that any human lives sacrificed in the name of a higher Q2 report are acceptable losses.
I am supposed to take these people seriously.
No.
Fuck you.
My wife is alive this evening and my family will endure the difficulties ahead of absolutely no thanks to you or your policies. I do not forget that. My anger will subside by tomorrow morning but I do not ever forget that.
Current Music: Neko Case, “Star Witness”
Creative Control 
Bilal and Dana (and Robin) –
Jarad and I send a lot of love your way. I am so glad you are okay.
Xoxo,
Danielle