We had watched recent events unfolding in America from our veranda overlooking the Philippine Sea. Namely, the ascension of a new president radically different from those who’d come before. Now we were re-entering our homeland for the first time since Donald Trump assumed office and wondering what was in store.
“Passport please,” the immigration officer said to my 14-year-old son standing just ahead of me in line.
We were US citizens with nothing to hide, but troubling reports regarding unpleasant border encounters had made us wary. The officer glanced through Isaac’s passport book, stamped it with a smile, and waved him through. Then he did something I’d never seen before; waved me through too, without even looking at my passport.
Wow, I thought, things really HAVE changed.
But my relief was premature. A few yards on, a uniformed security agent gave us an unfriendly glare. “How are you two related?” she demanded to know.
“He’s my son,” I said. Then, noting her mounting look of skepticism, quickly added an addendum. “His mother is Filipino,” I explained, “so we don’t look the same.”
Thus began our first day in a native land that somehow seemed to have changed.
The change isn’t always apparent and sometimes, as at the airport, can be experienced in contrasting ways. But change is undoubtedly in the air, blowing on your face like a cool ocean breeze. Or a chilling frost-bitten one, depending on where you’re standing when it starts to howl.
Like talking to a Trump-hating buddy who, as most Trump haters do, assumes everyone else hates him too. “Wow, can you believe what that jerk said today?” he chirps, and you want to respond honestly but are afraid of losing a friend.
In fact, I’ve lost several. Even my own brother disowned me for writing a column, only partly in jest, entitled “Confession: Hamas Made Me Vote for Trump.” And it goes both ways; presidential haters have lost friends and family too.
Here’s the point: the country is sorely divided. More so than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime, which, believe me, covers a pretty long stretch. Part of the problem is a culture in which, unlike the Philippines where strangers remain politely tightlipped, Americans increasingly wear their political opinions on their sleeves.
Or sometimes on their lapels, as a Walmart pharmacist did recently while preparing my blood-pressure-regulating prescription.
“I’m a Palestinian,” she proudly proclaimed when asked about the foreign flag pinned to her shirt. “But not from Gaza.”
“Oh?” I replied. “Where are you from?”
“Right next to Gaza,” she said, which I took to mean Israel.
“You don’t identify as an Israeli?” I inquired.
“Would a Jew identify as a Nazi?” she countered. That ended our conversation, though I’m thinking of increasing my dosage.
Usually the tenson is verbal, driven by profound disagreements over what’s happening in America and the world. Increasingly, though, it surges into physical violence, as happened a few days after our arrival. That’s when a terrorist bomb destroyed a Palm Springs fertility clinic just down the road from our house.
It was “the largest bombing ever investigated in Southern California,” an FBI spokesman told the Los Angeles Times.
The perpetrator: a 25-year-old “anti-life” activist identifying as a “pro-mortalist,” i.e., someone who favors early death for all mortals to prevent future suffering. “Basically,” the Twentynine Palms resident explained in a pre-bombing post, “I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here.”
Fortunately, he was the only one killed in the blast.
But Twentynine Palms is just up the same road in the opposite direction from where that bomb exploded. Which means this nihilistic moron determined to cure the planet of what he calls the “disease of life” must have driven right through our tiny desert town with that powerful explosive on board.
Increasingly, it seems, life in America can be perilous.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Surigao City and Joshua Tree, California. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, can be purchased on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
