I've had a headache for two weeks now. The back of my neck is being squeezed by an unrelenting vice grip. And my stomach is in knots. Churning, burning knots that end when I sleep and start when I wake up.
This morning I thought, okay, it can't be the cold I've had. It must be stress-related. So I went through all the things that are going on in my life to identify the stressor.
I don't really have any stressful goings on in my life right now though.
Not compared to what's happened in the last couple of years.
Himself and I have reached a plateau of calm right now.
Of course, when I eventually figured it out, it's so blindingly obvious I can't understand why I didn't realise it.
It's election stress!!
Not that I'm involved in electioneering. For the first time in my life, I have a job which forbids me to be involved in the democratic process.
I am closely following two sets of elections, which are being fought by all the people I have worked with and cared for and fought with and yelled at and laughed with for the past twenty years.
And ironically (or maybe I am just the biggest election Jonah in the world), for the first time in my life, my friends and colleagues and comrades and fellow adventurers are poised to win both sets of elections.
No wonder I am weeping with the stress of the hope of it all.
Thank goodness I am not involved this time.
I would be a basket case.
Speaking of hope, this morning, I watched some of Obama's Cairo speech.
Into history he walked, loping onto the stage in that incredibly rangy relaxed way he has. Speaking in front of 3,000 people who must be so relieved to see a man who is supposed to be their enemy but who looks just like them. Quoting their holy book back to them so eloquently. Speaking about duty, the way their Muslim faith does.
I am not alone in my hope.
I listened to Michael Moore on the radio this week. He was being interviewed about GM. He was in no mood to forgive them their Flint sins. The interviewer asked him whether he was hopeful. He said he was full of hope for the future, because his new President was sly as a fox, and he reckoned if anyone could steer America back on track it was him.
Was this how my parents felt in 1961?
Himself was born 92 days after Kennedy was assassinated, the world was probably still grieving. I came along six years later, among the last of the Gen-Xers. With a few small fillips, we have only experienced a paucity of vision and leadership in our lives.
We have lived through the 73 Oil Crisis, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Quebec question, Reaganomics, Mulroney and NAFTA, Thatcherism, US meddling in Central and South American democracy, the hunger strikes, the ozone layer, the fall of Communism, continuous conflict in the supposedly civilized Mediterranean region (Basque separatism, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, Libya), Bush I, Monica Lewinsky, Bush II, 9-11+ other bombings, two wars over oil, the failure of the New Labour dream, the destruction of democracy in Haiti, Tianamen Square, the continual rearrangment of the rubble that is Afghanistan, the rape of the continent of Africa by disease and colonialism, and the gradual disintegration of trust in all of the political and public institutions we were (well I was, Himself is a total anarchist at heart) taught to believe in - politics, religion, public services, charitable organizations, educational institutions and most of all, the benign shadow of the Land of the Free.
Now we are nearly middle-aged, as well as the beginnings of chronic back/leg/joint-ache and the growing finality of the realisation that we will never ever be rich/idle/debt-free, we are facing into global warming and peak oil and the dismantling of the welfare state model round about the exact time we will be needing a nursing home bed.
No wonder I have a headache.
I have had my hopes dashed so many times...
Today though, I am only going to think about the fact that this time next week, the wheel may have turned a little bit towards my way of thinking.
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