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America’s Broken Heart Syndrome
I came across Broken Heart Syndrome watching a French TV series, Balthazar, (about a dashing Sherlockian coroner ). I remembered almost instantly a letter my mother wrote after the death of my brother Luke from AIDS in 1991, in which she described the sensation of her heart actually breaking, and I immediately understood that her pain was not just figurative, but physiologically literal.
It strikes me that this is what so many of us have been going through over the last 4 years. The initial cracking began as we witnessed the unimaginable rise of the pestilent gorgon, followed by shock at his Putinstallation as President. This was accompanied by the nausea-inducing realization that 62 million of our nominal compatriots were infected with a level of fear and grievance that we had mistakenly convinced ourselves were in permanent retreat after 8 years of enlightened leadership by the first African-American President.
This week, Michelle Obama articulated the spiritual depression many millions of us have been struggling with — the sharp, continuing ache that will only begin to subside if a decisive national majority irrevocably asserts itself on Election Day, even as we are horrified that it will have taken the preventable deaths of 300,000 Americans, the loss of 40 million jobs, and the police killings of many score unarmed African-Americans to have awakened enough…
