It’s a difficult time for the world and America, but it’s also a challenging time for me personally.

June 11th marked the 47th anniversary of the day my husband Tony and I got married.  And when the EMT people took him to the hospital sixteen months ago for what turned out to be a mini-stroke, they asked me, “What’s your relation to this man?” (they don’t want to make assumptions—you might be the daughter, the sister, or you might look like his aged mother but only be the wife!). “How long have you guys been married?” “Too long to leave him,” I joked.

Our life together has had a lot of good in it, even if things weren’t always easy. But for the last couple of years our life together has been so difficult. Tony’s been battling a progressive neurological disease, for which the doctors say there’s nothing to be done, except for trying to manage a few symptoms. He lives with this every day and it’s difficult to find hope. So when I woke up today and said happy anniversary, he scowled, as if there wasn’t much to be happy for. Not an unreasonable response. He’s depressed and that seems reasonable. Not everything is a pathology.

I’m grateful that we are still here and love each other. I’m grateful that we somehow negotiated a life together, which is more than many people can say. Will we still have another year? What will it be like? For him… and for me? 

On this anniversary, the sun is shining. Clear blue skies, low humidity, low seventies. Exactly the kind of day it was all those years ago when we got married in Connecticut looking out towards Long Island Sound. We have no plans today. The only thing we have to do is go to the podiatrist about the ulcerated diabetic wound on his toe, which refuses to heal. Not what you want to do on your anniversary, but it’s better than the alternative, which is amputation! These days going to the doctor is a project. We need our strong aide Esther to get Tony into his wheelchair, then into the car, then get him out and back into the wheelchair and then into the doctor’s narrow office with its cramped waiting room. The visit went fine, though the doctor said this wound would take a long time to heal …if it does at all. I guess this is called maintenance and not a cure.

“So where are we going for dinner?” Tony said as we were about to leave the doctor’s office. Tony was getting more cheerful just getting out. I reminded him that he’d not be able to go out to a restaurant until he’s no longer confined to a wheelchair. Especially because I can’t lift and transfer him by myself. But a few minutes later we were outside in the warm sunlight. Suddenly we thought, why can’t the three of us just walk a few blocks for lunch on the main street? Sit in a real restaurant for a celebratory meal?

So what if it might be pasta and he couldn’t handle the mess with his stiff, shaking hands? So what if some of the food ended up on the floor, or that it would raise his blood sugar ridiculously high?  I had to just ignore all of that and just let him enjoy the moment. 

Near the end of our meal, my cell phone rang. “This is a representative from Harris and Harris trust. This phone call may be recorded.” Blah blah blah. They had called me a couple of days earlier when I was driving home. I’d told them at the time that we have no account with them, and to not both me with promos. I’d hung up. But here they were again. This time they announced, “we need to collect payment from you for Columbia Doctors,” the doctors we see at New York Presbyterian. A collection agency! Someone from the billing office had sent one of Tony’s many doctor’s bills to the collection agency—a mistake since the insurance had already paid the bill.  But the collection agent said it wasn’t up to her to fix it. They just want the money. I would have to take it up with the Columbia Doctors.

And so I come home, take Tony’s blood sugar (which is of course too high), and start to assemble all those stacks of papers—doctors’ bills, Aetna’s statements of estimated benefits, records of my many previous phone calls to both Columbia Doctors and Aetna—so that I can spend the next hour or so trying to fix this one problem before tackling the next, which is likely to appear in the next day or two.

While I make my phone calls, Tony takes a little nap. But he’s having trouble sleeping--probably the high blood sugar—and now he’s talking and seems a bit delirious. And calling me every few minutes. When I go in, he is angry and mad with me. This is not my husband. “Things are changing,” he says. “I don’t like this.”  You don’t like what? I ask. “I’m not master of the house!”

Well, happy anniversary to us. It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon and we have hours to go.

Who would have thought we’d get to a point where democracy is at risk of dying in America and that the beacon of light (in my opinion) to the world is dimming.  The Statue of Liberty was given to us by France, on the centennial anniversary of the American Revolution, when America declared its independence from a king. That’s what the American Revolution was all about. In a monarchy, the people are the king’s subjects.  In a republic (or democracy), the people are citizens. A very big difference. And now we have a person in the White House with a large fan base who says he wants to make America “Great Again,” and he’s talking and acting as if he is (or aspires to be) a king. 

I think more than ever about our country’s history as I teach my undergraduate courses on Milton and on the Enlightenment at Barnard College. There was a time, perhaps, when my teaching and study of this period seemed like an escape from the present, something I could anchor myself in, escaping anxiety about the here and now. But no more. What I teach is more relevant than ever (or “relatable” as my students often say). The words we read in those old texts by dead white men sound a warning, like an air raid or tornado siren. And these young women and men hear it loud and clear. 

This whole year has felt like a lesson in the connection between the present and the past, but particularly this spring semester 2019, which has just ended.

As the showdown between the House’s Judicial Committee and President Trump was starting in April following “The Mueller Report,” my Enlightenment Colloquium syllabus was at the point where we were reading about the American and French Revolutions. We had already read Milton, Locke and Spinoza on toleration and the necessary separation of church and state to preserve freedom of conscience (and freedom of the press).  Now my students read selections from a century later: Thomas Paine, the American Declaration of Independence, the first article of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. On one beautiful spring afternoon after weeks of rain, we sat outside around a table, discussing history and these writings, as the trees with their new green leaves provided shade. We took turns reading passages and contemplating them. The indictments of the King of England in the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence: his “usurpations,” his refusal to “Assent to Laws,” his “Invasions on the Rights of the People,” his “Violations of Law,” his “Cutting Off Our Trade with all Parts of the World.” “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice,” “made judges dependent on his Will alone.”  I was teaching history and historical documents, and had not intended to give a lesson about our present situation. But there was no ignoring the parallels. 

We read James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, where he worries about “the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations,” a “faction” in which “a number of citizens are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” My women students were shocked at how current these texts seemed, as if they were addressed to them. I remembered Milton’s comment in Areopagitica (1644) that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them.”  All of my students spoke, feeling these readings and the questions the writers raised were urgent. When they read James Madison’s definition of dangerous faction as a group (minority or majority), which is “adverse to the rights of other citizens,” they saw a prediction of our present dangers: one of which is the growing number of states outlawing abortion, restricting the rights of women, in the hopes that the Supreme Court, now stocked with so-called “pro-life” justices, will overturn Roe vs. Wade. A situation that also violates the First Amendment on the separation of church and state. And they asked: is democracy declining? 

In my Milton course, we had been studying the seventeenth-century, not the eighteenth. We read his polemical prose during the English Revolution (1642-1660), as a lead up to his epic Paradise Lost  Milton’s writings all were concerned with liberty, with its challenges and problems and they influenced the American Revolution. In Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1664), defending Parliament’s trial and conviction of Charles I, Milton boldly declared, “all men naturally were born free, being the image of God.” He insisted that “the power of kings and magistrates is …committed to them in trust from the people…in whom the power yet remains fundamentally.” But Milton didn’t like kings, particularly kings who claimed absolute power. He was outraged by men who set themselves up as gods to be worshipped. (And what do we see but something like the idolization of a king in those hysterical Trump rallies?) Then my class read Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, published in 1660 as England was about to bring back Charles II and restore monarchy. Milton, distraught and angry, accused the English of preferring to return to bondage of Egypt (that is, to live under a king) than to do the hard work of liberty. He mocked a king who would “pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing done that can deserve it.” We’ve witnessed the same. Milton was a Christian, saw things in terms of sin, and thus was alert to the idolatry inherent in any person’s ambition to be God-like, above the law, and in people eager to worship him, who he feared might be a majority. My students didn’t miss any of the connections with our present moment. They left the course knowing that history is important, and understanding the contemporary relevance of these old texts, and (I hope) inspired to act and to vote. 

Only days after our classes ended, Representative Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, appeared on TV, saying that Trump is acting like a king who believes he is above the law. “He wants to make himself a king, and Congress cannot permit that.” If my students were watching (they were probably too busy writing their term papers, taking their finals), surely they made the connection with those warnings against tyranny and unchecked power that they had read in my courses. Nadler’s language precisely echoed the American Revolution where the revolutionaries rebelled against England’s King George III, who, like James I and Charles II in the seventeenth century, insisted his power was absolute, that he could ignore the law.  Now we have an American president, many of whose followers think he has been appointed by God, and who claims to be above the law when he repeatedly invokes “executive privilege” and refuses to release information or share it with Congress, the elected representatives of “the people,” when he jokes that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  We make comparisons to the 1930s, with its xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and anxiety about borders, and they are apt. But I also feel like I’m reliving the period in English history I teach and write about—seventeenth-century England. That particular past (the literature, the history, the political and religious conflicts) now seems eerily and frighteningly current, as my students tell me more and more these days.