The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
I moved to New Zealand too late to love Marmite, and it won’t happen in a pandemic that demands the comfort food of childhood. American apple pie, please.
That said, I couldn’t have ridden it out in a safer place. New Zealand has been the Mr. Rogers of the pandemic world.
Granted it’s simpler to lock down a remote island nation with 5 million inhabitants than a sprawling country of 331 million. But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s go-hard strategy backed by scientific counsel and transparent communication stands in stark contrast to the U.S. response.
I may be sheltered from COVID-19, but not from America’s election distress: voting treacheries and national rifts compounded by global warming, pandemic chaos and economic woes. The exhaustion of family and friends there seeps into my marrow. I doomscroll, seek truth and scan newspapers for happy news, even if only a recipe for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies.
I watch from across the equator as Arizona endures a season without monsoons, as California and Colorado forests burn — places we visited on an epic camping trip when I was young — and feel more American than I have in my 20-year affiliation with New Zealand.
My appreciation of the best the USA has to offer has been renewed while I follow from afar the worst. Because my memory has been tripped. Because I have been made nostalgic by the inability to visit my daughter and grandson overseas. Because the satire of well-informed, gloomy Americans is unsurpassed.
Long before my dad taught at the University of Arizona, our family landed in Nashville when he joined Vanderbilt’s faculty. Our mother drove us downtown to the 1960s sit-ins (What was she thinking, ducking under barricade tape with two kids under 10 for a better view of the lunch counter where hecklers poured hot coffee over nonviolent resisters and put out cigarettes on their backs!).
I believe she wanted us to remember: This is what hate looks like, close up.
That same year, dad celebrated Estes Kefauver’s victory against an avowed segregationist. The election did not unfold under a pall. When your man won, results were sanctified in beery, smoky rooms. Gathered around the Lilliputian black-and-white TV, my father and colleagues were having the time of their lives.
Sen. Kefauver was a shockingly bad public speaker, but dad would have heard him with ears of a man who flew reconnaissance missions into France before D-Day for democracy’s sake and had been present when the concentration camp Buchenwald was liberated.
The pandemic has complicated voting for most of us. Mailing an absentee ballot across a disrupted world to Arizona where I am registered to vote was impossible. What, swim it in?
I emailed an inquiry and received a prompt response that began “Good morning, Janet. We can most certainly assist you (to vote).” Hip-hip-hooray for Arizona and the Pima County Recorder’s Office. My father would have rolled over in his grave had I not cast my ballot this year.
More than ever, we need the spirit of our fathers who fought for freedom; of our mothers who educated us about blind hatred firsthand; of a respect for Mother Earth that led some parents to toss two kids, seatbeltless, into an old Chevy one summer to instill in them awe for America’s National Parks. Our grandchildren need it, dammit.
My heart in troubled times lies with my country of birth. And like the allegiance I pledged at primary school all those years ago, my vote goes to liberty and justice for all.
