Working Through the Illusion of Separation

All the images above were taken from windows of an Amtrak train, which I rode all the way from southern California to Seattle, Washington over the course of a day and a half. While I'm not the best photographer, I think the coastline does well in extolling its own beauty. My trip started the day after the election so beholding and admiring the land was the best possible medicine for a wounded heart.

There was a man in my train car a row away from me who saw very little of it. His destination was only a few stops before mine so every time I was in my seat, I was subjected to his droning to the older woman in front of him and the man in the row adjacent to his. His entire life was about money and materialism, yet he apparently had neither much money nor materials. He was unable to stay in certain hotels, did not use banks, and could tell the difference between legitimate Apple products and counterfeits from China.

Even as I retell this, I can't tell you exactly what it was about the beginning content that drove me crazy. It's just that I wasn't surprised when he started gloating that Elon Musk was going to fire half the government. "Well, we still need certain departments," the woman in front of him who I think may not have known him said. "Like the Department of Education."

The man, clearly in need of more services from the Department of Education, said, "Uh, yeah. I guess so."

I left at that point to cool myself off. I came back later and he namedropped Joe Rogan so I left again. It clarified for me how Trump won the election and how the dangerous seeds Peter Thiel started insidiously planting with the Gawker situation in 2011 were bearing fruit. Throughout the rest of the trip, a senior woman whose husband of 40 years was openly abusive to her while she sported bruises from a New Orleans cobblestone injury told me with dead certainty that we were doomed as a country. Near the end of the ride, a young man in his 20s spoke admirably of Trump while trying to hit on a woman who uncomfortably shifted away.

It was an illustrative sort of train trip. Economically depressed, undereducated white men described how they bought into Trump's and Musk's branding because they had no idea they were being exploited and would deny it if they were told. On the other hand, women were very aware of the violence coming their way because they had to dance between it their whole lives and now it was getting larger. There I was, both genders, the most under threat.

There is dispute on the left for how sorry we should feel for these types of men. I can tell you I did not feel at all sorry for them while I was triggered while trapped on a train. In fact, I hated them because it is their stupidity that is going to bring down the rest of us even as they are technically outnumbered.

I went back to my seat to nap and woke up as the man and his conversational partner in the other row were packing up their things. I had assumed they were friends and had boarded together because I could not have imagined enduring his selfish preoccupations otherwise.

"It was really nice talking to you," the friend said in a respectful, almost awestruck tone. "See you in the next life."

I'm a reincarnationist who believes in timing, not coincidence. I know the experience of meeting someone whom I have met before, and I know that some of them end up in our lives for only a few hours instead of years. As much as it concerned me that neither of these men cared for the beauty outside the train windows nor for the equally invaluability of human life, those short sentences melted my hatred and helped me to understand that they were in fact doing something important during that trip. They were reconnecting.

I have been a selfish, materialistic man. I have been a man of violence. I have been a man vulnerable to more powerful men's propaganda. I have lived so many brutish, ugly, shortsighted lives.

This is not one of them.

I pray for the happiness of all beings. I pray for the Goodness inherent in the inevitability of Change and its cycles. I pray for those two men, in this lifetime and the next, even as their current forms contribute to putting mine in danger.

I want us all to be comfortable, cared for, and free.