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groinem-46-blog · 5 months ago

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First, thanks for your kind wishes, yes I was hit by a car over 3 weeks ago, and yes there were various after-effects, but I'll be OK. What I'm going to write about now is more spiritual. I found myself this morning in the Flatiron district, visiting my office, and suddenly I was in a nostalgic mood. So I bought the one New York Times sitting forlornly on a Newsstand and visited Eisenberg's Sandwiches, an amazing recreation of an old-fashioned NYC Luncheonette. So over a delicious sandwich reading an old-fashioned Newspaper made out of paper, I read David Wallace-Wells' excellent column, "This Isn't Reform, It's Sabotage." Which goes rather seamlessly with another very good writer, Susan Glasser in The New Yorker, writing about "Elon Musk's Revolutionary Terror." Yes, these people who are on the front lines of thought-awakening (there will be a concentrated effort to shut them down soon), are doing the crucial work of truth-telling.

I stopped watching all the numerous news shows that I watched avidly all through the Presidential Campaign, and between not feeling too great and wanting to take a distance and think about other things, I haven't missed them. But we can't hide from what's happening. I have been feeling kind of patriotic as a left-wing New Yorker, an academic and psychotherapist, believing that this is my America and it's just as real as any other. But reading the pieces I read over a nostalgic breakfast I realized that my America and even eventually my New York may just disappear.

There is a coup going on and it has a lot of the earmarks of success. The courts are our one hope, but let's look hard at the Supreme Court. Does the future of America depend on John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? It just might. Did you want to lay odds?

I'm an optimistic person, maybe too much so, and I think, here's easy but true psychoanalysis, it's because I had a kind mother despite her being an Auschwitz Survivor. But sometimes something happens, there's a Click inside me. It happened this morning and it said: what is happening in these United States is terrible indeed. My brother decided years ago to live in Europe and I have decided to chance it out here. I still think there's a chance that the more progressive forces in America will be terrified into efficient action and programs at last. Maybe. But maybe not.

So maybe France or even Germany or the UK, is where many of us will be going after all.

Sincerely,

Gav Reisner

Gavriel Reisner, LP, PhD

Licensed Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist

Writer and Critic

Faculty Member, NPAP

#gavriel reisner #literature and psychoanalysis

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