What Am I Worried About?

In response to a question about what Americans should do, Senator Tim Kaine asked a crowd of supporters gathered in Blacksburg, Virginia – of which I was a member – to pause for a moment and ask themselves a question.

“What are you worried about?”

This was on the Sunday after the Friday President Trump signed what’s now termed the Muslim ban. Senator Kaine asked us to specifically, truly and personally answer the question for ourselves.

Words and images came to my mind in a rush – my former employee from Iran whisked away in the night, my father losing his retirement account through a stock market crash, my sister blocked by airport closings from seeing her newborn grandson. But I kept going deeper and deeper, lifting layer after layer, trying to get to the essence of my fear.

And I got there.

I am afraid that I will be found unacceptable. And then they will come for me.

I lived half a century on this planet as an acceptable-enough person. I did well in school, became a teacher, and did my best to live a principled life. I paid my bills and taxes. I am very sorry my two marriages didn’t work out, but I had the very best of intentions and truly did my best with what I understood at the time.

At nearly 50, I developed alcoholism. I’ve been in remission for just over 4 years and disclosed it publicly with 16 months of abstinence. I had no idea of the resentment, bitterness, even rage that people have about “alcoholics” until I received that label.

To me, I was going along as an acceptable-enough person, got hit with more trauma than I could handle in a very short time, including the shootings at Virginia Tech – 10 years ago this year – alcohol did the mysterious, black box thing it does on some brains – and I could no longer stop myself from drinking more, and more often, than I intended. At the end of 2012, without consulting anyone, I threw myself off the cliff of abstinence, beginning a period of unexpected, appalling anguish from which I am only beginning to emerge after nearly a half decade of endurance.

We studied Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul in high school English and Mrs. Maybury showed us a drawing by a fellow classmate of the “Over-Soul” – the essence of being human – as an ocean from which a droplet fell into each person.

I did not choose to develop alcoholism. It happened to me. The bodily container for this little droplet from the great ocean of humanity that is mine for this lifetime just happened to develop alcoholism. It might have developed diabetes or asthma or another chronic illness. But I contracted alcoholism.

Contrary to the latest findings of science, alcoholism and other addictions are still believed to be moral problems, not medical problems.

Some people, therefore, believe that I am bad. Or that I am capable of more badness than most. I am believed to not believe right, think right, choose right, do right, or be right.

I have done my very best to reverse alcoholism within me. I believe if anyone could do it, I could. A perfect storm of opportunity for healing exists. I am smart, healthy, well-educated, professionally successful, psychologically-minded and self-disciplined. I have specialized training and experience in addictions treatment and the backing of my family, both personally and financially. I had nearly 50 years to achieve full brain development and establish healthy living norms.

I can’t make alcoholism budge. I drank non-alcoholic beverages at the political gathering but I whimpered every time a glass wine or beer passed near my face in the packed restaurant. Nothing I can humanly do changes what happened in my brain that makes me long for alcohol.

Some people with untreated alcoholism do inhumane things. Some people with untreated alcoholism do humane things. One cannot generalize about the many from the few.

“All alcoholics should be shot at dawn – and that goes for drug users as well.” Comments like this one abound on the Internet.

Alcoholics won’t be shot at dawn in America, right? We would never do what Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is doing. Would we?

We don’t punish people for who they are, right? It’s not the color of our skin – or any other condition that’s simply a result of happenstance, i.e. where we were born, or which chronic illness we might have developed – but content of character, right, on a case-by-case basis?

Except on Friday, January 27, 2017, our president chose to use laws against people who happen to be the way they are. The assumption was that, based on the way they are, i.e. where they happen to be from, they might do something we don’t want them to.

I have that same profile. Because of what has happened to me – the illness I have contracted, not, in this case, the country I am from – since some people with alcoholism do terrorize others, I could be grouped with that “some,” given a label, and become a member of a group to which things are done en masse.

What am I worried about, Senator Kaine? That America will do to the group of people who have what I have what they are doing to this group. And then I dread what group might be next and who might be considered a member. My elderly father because he writes about science? My sister because she had 3.0 children instead of 2.1?  Who knows what the arbitrary criterion will be? What will be the droplet of humanity that will mark each of us for persecution?