Pushing Rocks
On Prince Charming, the Beautiful Princess and Immigrations
In the Disney fairy tale, Prince Charming is a white man in shining armor and the wide-eyed princess looks beautiful in her pink prom dress. I once had a lover who declared, when he looked up from fixing his car, “I need you. I want to be your prince in shining armor but my armor is tarnished.” I was, of course immediately enchanted and stuck with him off and on for another thirty fraught years. There’s the problem with fairy tales. They are beautiful. They usually supersede the complexities of reality.
What do we value?
This past week I have been thinking of my grandparents, who failed to escape Nazi Poland before anecdotally committing murder suicide to escape their fate. I never met them and never heard a verifiable account of why they didn’t leave although I know their four children either left on their own or were sent out. Increasingly, as this country appears to move inexorably towards lawless but theocratic and oligarchic fascism- the conflation of all possible abhorrent systems of “governance”- I think about my grandparents decision and the consequences: stay with hope or stay with despair but either way, the end result is tragic.