For the last eight months, though really for four years, my world (our world) has felt like it was spinning out of control.  Yes, the coronavirus, in its seemingly endless cycles throughout the U.S. and beyond, which has seen more deaths and cases per population than the rest of the world, making America the present leader in a category we’d prefer not to be. The repeated changing of instructions by our leaders as we grapple with how to live with Covid-19, continues to surprise us, and then there are the aftershocks people previously infected are experiencing. The vicious cycle of hopes and disappointments over treatments and vaccines is simply overwhelming.

But there are so many other plagues that we are suffering from in America—political and cultural divisions, increased sales of guns and ammo, the appearance of militia men who want to take the law into their own hands, a president and at least one of his counselors who advise martial law, a president who threatens not to accept the results of an election or to leave office peacefully; the emboldening of white supremacists who threatened armed violence; the explosion of conspiracy theories and QAnon, which (like right-wing white supremacists with their mistaken notions of what liberty means) foment suspicion rather than trust, hatred rather than love. So many expressions of venom and threats of violence makes me sick. 

No longer do Americans agree that there is a difference between truth and falsehood (let alone good and evil). Some of the same people who announce they are “pro-life” when it comes to conception hold the lives of others in little regard, sometimes don’t even regard people of different races, ethnicities, or religions as fully human beings. The times, and America, feels vertiginous. It has lost its balance, and I can only hope it will regain its equilibrium and sanity after November 3rd, and move to become the place where all humans can live freely, though lately that seems like a distant dream.

            Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all of this. I work hard to keep steady, focused and hopeful. I show up. I do the work I believe I am supposed to do in this world. Even after so many decades of teaching and mentoring young people, I still love my work and feel a sense of purpose in my life. But then, unexpectedly, last week one morning, I was felled by an attack of vertigo!

I’d gotten up, sent a brief prayer of gratitude out into the universe, and had my cup of green tea. I began my pilates session with my wonderful trainer, Alexandra, breathing deeply, centering myself, only to become profoundly dizzy when I lay down on the floor to continue. The room spun, my head spun, and I could find no center. As John Donne said in “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World” (1611) lamenting the decay of the world,

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, and all relation. 

Our world seems sick, falling apart. And now suddenly I felt sick. I was so dizzy and nauseous that only after a time, was I able to slowly get on my hands and knees and navigate through the rooms of my apartment to find a bottle of water. One minute I had been fine, and strong, exercising, ready to begin my day. The next minute, I was flat on my back, the room spinning. I could talk just fine and think, so I knew this wasn’t a stroke. It was probably crystals that had gotten loose in my middle ear causing vertigo as it had four or five years ago. But right now, I was terrified. Would I survive this if it continued on?

For several days I was incapacitated, stressed by the anxiety of my condition, anxiety that maybe I was plummeting towards my end and not healthy, but also anxious because I had so many papers to grade. Soon I’d have to teach on Zoom. Was all that internet and computer activity damaging me or was it something more? Or maybe was more symbolic, like a mirror of everything that was going on in the world, my crazy America, spinning out of control, all while on the heels of an historic election. Now this, on top of the anxiety I’d suffered for several years as my husband was slowly dying of multiple system atrophy? Even MSA seemed a symbol of America, its multiple systems atrophying!

At the moment though, struck by vertigo, I thought of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which I had been teaching in my 17th Century Prose and Poetry class only a month earlier, a proper introduction teaching in the year of our plague. Donne was suffering from the plague and unsure whether he would survive. Donne’s words describing his experience almost four hundred years ago, when he was stricken, dizzy, confined to his bed, sounded as if I could have written them myself.

“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; . . .

We attribute but one privilege and advantage to man's body above other moving creatures, that he is . . . of an erect, of an upright, form . . . Other creatures look to the earth. . . This is man's prerogative; but what state hath he in this dignity? A fever can fillip him down, a fever can depose him; a fever can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold five feet towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot to-day, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.”

Thankfully, my vertigo eventually stopped. I’m fine and went to vote last Sunday. I’m hopeful for a good outcome (for myself, and for the nation). I remain cautious, fearing a relapse, but pray every day that America too will soon regain its balance, and become stable and healthy again.

You would have thought that when Donald Trump came down with Coronavirus, it would have caused a shift by this maskless president who discounts the advice and knowledge of scientists. You would also have thought his supporters, who ridicule mask wearing and flaunt their freedom to resist guidelines to social distance, would now see the consequences of recklessness and recognize the seriousness of Covid-19, which is clearly not a hoax. But no. Instead, only a few days after the president was diagnosed and hospitalized, news reports confirm that the political divisions in the U.S. remain the same or have intensified.

Trump supporters are still ardent. Like the president, they don’t want to admit they were wrong. Rather than acknowledging Trump was foolish to deny the severity of the virus and to refuse to wear a mask, they accept and declare that it’s everywhere and can’t be avoided. He is still their “savior,” or as right wing white evangelicals say, the “chosen one,” like America itself, favored by God. Redemption hasn’t happened, and neither has the Second Coming, but as in past centuries when messianic fervor struck (and God knows, we really do need redemption in America), Trump’s followers remain faithful, their hopes of salvation just pushed into the future.

So what will happen this November 3rd, now less than a month away? As Joe Biden says, “the soul of America” is at stake. I believe Democracy is at stake, as well as “American Exceptionalism,” a term that now seems heavily ironic. Yes, we are exceptional. We’ve had more deaths from Covid-19 than any other country. Exceptionalism and election are two ideas that actually intertwine. For exceptionalism has been the belief since the first settlers that America is God’s chosen or elect country with its people and lands blessed. With the American Revolution and her Declaration of Independence from the authority of an overbearing monarch in Britain, America was supposed to be a beacon of light to the world—a concept evoking the words of the prophet Isaiah who in chapter 60 described Jerusalem restored, the people redeemed, in the “end days.”

This notion of America’s exceptionalism as a light to the world--revived by former President Ronald Reagan—has been a core principle of Trump’s, Make America Great Again, aka MAGA. And because of its biblical foundation, even if Trump wasn’t aware of it, the president’s touting of American exceptionalism has been embraced by his evangelical core, a position even ultra-conservative Catholics can join. And that’s because the devotion to their “Savior” and the president is often indistinguishable from one another. No wonder his rallies resemble megachurch revivals wherever they occur.

We are exceptional alright. These days it feels like we’re losing our image of that shining beacon the world used to look up to and consider an example to emulate. The president’s friends are autocrats and dictators instead of leaders of democratic countries. Rather than welcoming immigrants and refugees, as the Statue of Liberty promises (a statue given to America by France on the anniversary of the American Revolution), under Trump immigrants seeking refuge have been “detained,” resulting in family separations, children put in cages and women given unconsented and unexplained “gynecological procedures” that sterilized them. Trump is limiting immigration while expressing the hope that we get immigrants from “Nordic countries.” This all sounds frighteningly familiar to me. Moreover, under Trump and his cohorts in government, we have a policy of isolation, much as America did in the 1930’s, a time when America restricted immigration, particularly from undesirable countries and populations. We have also withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, as if there is the belief that America will be exceptional and unaffected by the devastation of the climate, just as the president assumed he would be unaffected by Covid-19. But there are no borders to these disasters, no walls that can keep them away, or any assurance they’ll only affect your enemies.

Now the United States is severly diminished in the eyes of the world. Other nations no longer admire us and have closed their borders to Americans to keep out the plague.

In 1783, in the aftermath of the American Revolution and a time of hope, Reverend Ezra Stiles, one of a long line of Protestant ministers who became President of Yale, preached a lenghy sermon that was soon printed. The United States elevated to glory and honor. Stiles declared that Moses’s words to biblical Israel in Deuteronomy 26:10 (“And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy God, as he hath spoken.”) were not about Jewish Israel but about “God’s American Israel.”  America was fulfilling the prophecy, and Stiles envisions a glorious future for the new nation. “This great American Revolution, this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty” will be “contemplated by all nations” (463). Not only its model of polity but its practice of “toleration” “religious liberty,” and “benevolence” will spread to other nations. Stiles’s rapturous sermon gave Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration an Old Testament foundation, but had a Protestant religious purpose, for he envisions reformed (Protestant) Christianity spreading around the world. This biblically based American Exceptionalism is still quite alive today.

But it seems as if we are more like the English people John Milton described in early 1660, the people who were about to bring back their king, once England’s experiment in republicanism had failed. Milton too, earlier in his career had written of England as God’s special nation, but now he compared the English to the biblical Israelites who wanted to return to Egypt. They had been delivered from slavery but found the work of liberty too hard. Milton predicted that if they supported the king and “put their necks under kingship,” their actions would make them “a scorn and derision to all our neighbors.” This was the phrase that sadly came to my mind as I watched the presidential debate knowing that the rest of the world was also watching.

We will see what the election will bring. Everything is at stake. God help us.