Dear America,
It has been too long since I’ve written. It pains me to know you’ve been bullied, betrayed, misrepresented, death threats left in a basket at your door. Each attempt to heal from these abuses gets met with more cruelty. Threats of vengeance have become a currency with which the abusers hope to buy the future, the planet be damned. It’s hard to know what to say when so much has been said so well, and yet the vitriol continues. All I can do is start with the day.
This morning, early autumn, walking on an empty sand beach in the North, I was startled to see animal tracks in the wet sand. Dog beside human. Then smaller, sharper, but similar, paw prints marked with claws digging into sand. River otter. And the dog sniffing its way, you could tell from its prints, along the scent trail. Then pointed divots of deer hooves, as they too had come out of the woods to explore, perhaps get a lick of salt off the beach. I was feeling rich in that moment, knowing the wild ones were here and sorry that my arrival may have sent them back into the cover of scrub.
Met a guy walking towards me, sweatshirt and yellow ear buds.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“There’s dead krill all over the beach.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
Then I saw them. They were scattered like dead leaves, but brighter, shiny, glassine, like skinny translucent shrimp. The food seabirds, baleen whales, sharks, and seals eat. Kill the krill, and the damage ramifies all the way up the food chain.
The man took out one ear bud. Pointed to the salmon cages offshore.
“I used to dive there.”
“I don’t have anything good to say about them,” I replied.
I had a friend who did that job for a few years. She made the “mort dives,” which meant lowering down into the feedlot of farmed salmon to cull out the dead ones contaminating the crop. This feedlot is in open sea water, so spoiled feed, feces, medication, all permeate the water and the ocean floor like a toxic bloom.
“They just dosed them,” he said.
“Got to bring the fish farms on land.”
“They’re doing it in B.C. These will be gone soon, too.”
“I hope so.”
Ear bud back in.
A few feet farther along the beach, a dead harbor seal, red flesh exposed where the plush fur had peeled partially away. Enough fur remaining, mottled black and silver-gray, to imagine it as a coat. Probably shot. A competitor to the multinational corporation that runs the fish farms. It’s an unfair competition. All the seal wants is to make a living. The corporation wants to make more money than it takes to make a living.
There’s a phenomenon in nature called “surplus killing,” as when hyenas go on a spree, taking down more gazelles than they can possibly eat, just for the joy of killing. A kind of temporary insanity—for it is insane to destroy the source of one’s sustenance.
Where am I going with this? I thought I had found a metaphor for the election. Trump and Vance are dead krill and toxic salmon and slaughtered seals. Harris and Walz are wild deer and otters, people and dogs, out for a morning stroll on the beach. Which side are you on?
Good for a laugh, but, America, how do I speak to that part of you that finds the whole system so corrupt—the buying of votes, the injustices of “justice,” weapons mongering domestic and global, the pontificating of political piety—you’d just rather not participate. As if not participating had anything to do with making things better. But, heck, you don’t really believe they can get better, so you’ll sit this one out.
Okay. Let me try another metaphor. The dinner menu. You’ve been invited out to dinner by the person who means the most to you in the world. Your lover, your mentor, your mother, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Kid Rock. When you see the menu, you know you’re in trouble. You are a raw foodist. Raw meat and milk, raw vegetables, homemade kombucha. The menu offers two choices: bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread or farm-raised salmon with lemon caper sauce. Both are unacceptable to you. But you have to eat, because the social contract you signed by accepting the invitation requires it. It’s really not hard to tell which is the better meal.
Implausible analogy. Let’s try another. Outlaw. America loves its outlaws. Gangsters, thugs, maniacs, hipster crooks. Butch and Sundance, Serpico, the Godfather, Oceans 11 (such fun!), every week a new rapist on Law and Order SVU, Mad Max: Fury Road. Do we watch to see the skill and glee of criminals, to see the crime solved, the criminal held accountable, the law upheld? Do we watch to face the reality of human cruelty and violence, the desire in us to be a transgressor? Do we watch to prepare ourselves for the fall of law and order, fearful that moral and legal constraints will fail us?
The problem with the outlaw analogy is that this election is not a television show or a movie. This is real life. “Outlaw” is not a metaphor. An outlaw is running for president, enabled by a political party taken over by outlaws, for if you aid and abet a violent insurrection to take over the United States government, you are an outlaw and ready to throw out any laws that do not suit your insatiable need for attention and power.
So, Dear America, consider my letter an intervention. You are in trouble and those who love you, I mean, really love you for what’s beautiful about you, even for your flaws, have come to tell you that we will carry you through this crisis, we will not let you fall. And, dear reader, if I have failed to give you confidence in that pledge of allegiance, please submit your metaphor here.
With love,
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Read additional work by Alison Hawthorne Deming appearing in Terrain.org: “Letter to America in the Form of a Review of Ander Monson’s Predator,” “Letter to America, 2020,” Letter to America poem: “Territory Drive,” our original “Letter to America,” “Spill Stories: Drag Racing to the End of the World,” “The Cheetah Run,” “Ruin and Renewal,” three poems, plus an interview with Alison: “A More Encompassing View of Human Flourishing.”
Header photo by of salmon fisheries at Grand Manan by Russ Heinl, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Alison Hawthorne Deming by Bear Guerra.