Bewilderment

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IN EARLY MARCH THE PRESIDENT INVOKED the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to arrest a journalist. She’d been publishing accounts from a White House leaker and refused to reveal her source. So the President ordered the Justice Department to order the Treasury to release any Suspicious Activity Reports on her. Based on those reports and on what the President called “credible tips from foreign powers,” he took her into military custody.

The media cried bloody murder. At least, half the media did. The top three opposition candidates for the next fall’s election said things the President condemned as “aiding and abetting America’s enemies.” The minority Senate leader called the action the gravest constitutional crisis in our lifetime. But constitutional crises had become commonplace.

Everyone waited for Congress to move. There was no movement. Senators in the President’s party—old men armed with polls—insisted that no laws had been broken. They scoffed at the idea of First Amendment violations. Violent clashes rolled through Seattle, Boston, and Oakland. But the general public, including me, once again proved how good the human brain was at getting used to anything.

Everything had happened in broad daylight, and against shamelessness, outrage was impotent. The crisis gave way to another flavor of craziness two days later. But for two days, I was strapped to the news. I’d sit in the evenings, doom-scrolling, while Robbie painted endangered species at the dining room table.

Sometimes I worried that Decoded Neurofeedback had left him too calm. It didn’t seem natural for any boy his age to be so single-minded. But, addicted to the national emergency, I was no one to talk.

One night, the news channel I distrusted the least cut from the fading constitutional crisis to an interview with the world’s most famous fourteen-year-old. The activist Inga Alder had launched a new campaign, biking from her home near Zurich to Brussels. Along the way, she was recruiting an army of teenage cyclists to join her and shame the Council of the European Union into meeting the emissions reductions they had long ago promised.

The journalist asked her how many bicyclists had joined her caravan. Miss Alder frowned, looking for a precision she couldn’t give. “The number changes each day. But today we are over ten thousand.”

The journalist asked, “Aren’t they enrolled in school? Don’t they have classes?”

The oval-faced girl in tight pigtails blew a raspberry. She didn’t look fourteen. She barely looked eleven. But she spoke English better than most of Robin’s classmates. “My house is burning down. Do you want me to wait until the school bell rings before I rush home to put it out?”

The journalist plunged on. “Speaking of school, how do you answer the American President when he says you should study economics before telling world leaders what to do?”

“Does economics teach you to shit your nest and throw away all the eggs?”

My pale, odd son drifted from the dining room and stood at my side. Who is that? He sounded hypnotized.

The interviewer asked, “Do you think there’s any chance this protest might succeed?”

She’s like me, Dad.

My scalp burned. I recalled why Inga Alder sounded ever so slightly otherworldly. She’d once called her autism her special asset—“my microscope, telescope, and laser, put together.” She’d suffered from deep depression and had even tried to take her own life. Then she found meaning in this living planet.

She cocked an eye at the bemused journalist. “I know our chance of failure if we do nothing.”

That’s what I’m saying! Exactly!

Robin twitched so hard I reached out to calm him. He pulled away. He had no use for calm. I don’t know why it felt so painful and bottomless, to be sitting three feet away at the moment my son first fell in love.