All my bad dreams have the same theme. I’ve lost something. Could be a passport, my car keys, my wallet, or my cellphone.
The setting is always the same. I’m looking for something and it is gone. I recall where I might have left it and return. It’s not there. I look and look, here and there. No luck. I panic and ask for help. No one is there. I’m lost and confused to the point of terror.
Then I wake and get my bearings. That never happened. I still have my thing. All is well.
Such bad dreams are common. Less common is for them to come true, as they did today. Or almost did. I went to the store and came home. I have no wallet. Where is it? Not in my shopping bag. Not in the car.
Back I go to the store, while strongly considering running lights. I did not, but I thought about it. I quickly cycled through the cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Finally, I rock up to the store and start crawling around on my knees, thinking that it fell out on the ground. It was not there.
So I rushed inside and walked up to the shopkeeper. I said, if you don’t know why I’m here, it is hopeless. What is hopeless, he asked? I said my wallet; I left it maybe. He said, Oh sure! Opened a drawer and handed it to me.
That moment, in an instant, a wild flush of gratitude, good fortune, shock, relief, terror that it could have been otherwise, loud rushes of crashing in my head mixed with symphonic sounds of elation.
Then followed by a kind of fake calm: what might have happened did not happen, so whatever. What’s next for my day?
But I knew the long-run effect of this. I will now have nights and nights of dreams of losing my wallet. In my sleep, I will not find it. I will crawl on all fours looking everywhere, all over town. Exhausted, panicked, I will wake and think: it was just a dream, a dream I was so certain that I would have that I wrote an article about it.
Still, I’m pretty sure the experience taps into a kind of terror we all have. We fear losing our identity either into the ether or having it stolen by someone else. We are suddenly no one and powerless. Alone and functionless in a world that cares not.
I suspect this phobia is amplified by the times in which we live. Our whole lives are embedded in digits. They float around everywhere, in locations secure and not.
One thing goes wrong and everything is lost. We no longer have control. Someone else does. We might try to patch things up. Fat chance. We can no longer speak to a person. Even if we do get a human on the phone, he won’t be able to do anything.
People don’t really run the machines anymore. The machines run the people.
At the airport last week, I was in line to board. I had noticed some strange problem with the app, so I was glad that the previous day I had printed my ticket to a PDF file and saved it in some other digital platform. Note to self: always do this.
As we approached the gate, the people who had paper tickets got right on the plane. I had my electronic paper ticket so I boarded just fine. But there were about six other people who had counted on the app to work. It did not work.
The flight attendant just stood there and said they could not board without a boarding pass. They were furious. There was nothing anyone could do. The machines would not cooperate. The app was down; therefore lives must relent to what the computer says is permissible and impermissible.
This is absurd, said everyone. We agree, said everyone.
Just before they closed the doors, the app briefly came back and everyone rushed on board.
Otherwise, these people would have found themselves in the usual game of airport roulette, running from kiosk to kiosk, standing in lines, rushing to book another flight, fighting for a place to stay, waiting for a van to pick them up, staying in some stupid hotel, getting up and heading back to the airport, going through security.
All for nothing.
This is how we live.
So, yes, we all live in fear of data leakage, app outages, fragility of the systems, machines eating our identities, thieves stealing our stuff, authorities mistaking us for someone else, and so on. Some prominent figures fear the knock at the door. They could be being swatted. Or maybe it is real and someone, somewhere has decided to find something on us.
There is a sense of profound insecurity from the last several years of life in America. Five years ago, and seemingly out of nowhere, our businesses, churches, schools, and everything but the big-box stores were closed. We could not move about. We could not hold parties or ceremonies. We would not travel but for a few places.
You don’t live through something like that and come out the same. It seemed in many ways like our lives were being stolen. Our government was stolen. Our laws were stolen. Our country was stolen.
Much of the politics of our time is defined by the search for what went missing, and a desperate hope to get it back. We want our friends, family, community, and sense of hope back. We want to feel secure again. We would like to feel like the future is bright, like we can move ahead with our lives without fearing a repeat.
Are we getting there? Perhaps, but it cannot happen fast enough. I’m already sensing impatience with the Trump administration. They are moving fast by normal standards, but there is so much to do, so much to fix, so much to restore. There is simply no way any real-world elected government can match the expectations for an instant golden age.
When the store handed me my wallet, all my fears drained away. The problem was gone. It was like it never happened. My only job was to shake off the trauma and remind myself to be grateful that what might have happened, did not happen.
The trauma of the last five years will not go away so easily. They did happen. No one has a wallet to hand us to make it go away. We have to adjust to the reality. We have to be patient as leadership finds the solution. We have to adapt to the slowness of real-life politics.
It is frustrating and sometimes unbearable. We think we know who did this and we want justice, but we know that this cannot and will not happen, at least not from the highest levels. The only real solution comes down to our lives. The government cannot fix them. We have to do that ourselves.
In some ways, we have indeed lived through a nightmare, and we are waking up slowly, realizing that it did happen. That gives us all an agenda. Get strong, get real, get to work, and make this deeply flawed world a better place for ourselves and our loved ones.
The wallet was stolen. Now we must reconstruct it and live to see another and hopefully better day.
