Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Dear Diary,
It’s 2:53 a. m. and it’s the third night in a row that I’ve not been able to sleep. Tonight, the President will give his State of the Union Address to Congress, and I hope he has been able to sleep despite the threat of Another World, geopolitically speaking.
One could say that the state of the Union is that we’re weathering The Secret Storm that has come in the guise of to wear or not wear a mask, to ban this book and not that one, to confirm or not confirm U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
As I toss and turn, trying to find the magic spot that will bring me sleep, I try to get in touch with my feelings. I’m surprised by my sense of helplessness. The feeling brings back memories of my second month as a college student. As my roommates and I sat close together listening to a staticky radio reporting on the Cuban Missile Crisis, I feared that I would not have my One Life to Live after all and, moreover, I had no agency to do anything about it.
Being at the brink of nuclear war was frightening and incomprehensible to a first-year college student in 1962. Today, as we approach The Edge of Night, the possibility is all too real. While we may feel some sense of security because Ukraine is on the other side of the world, during my tossing and turning, I recalled that long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida in 2013.
These are The Days of Our Lives that bring us to the brink of spiritual exhaustion.
My hope is that All My (our) Children will have the opportunity to be The Bold and the Beautiful.
For the Love of Life we need a Guiding Light to bring us out of this darkness.
Meanwhile, As the World Turns, we pray for the people of Ukraine.
Gwen Dungy 
A spot on set of musings about the state we are in while using humor to dramatize the soap opera quality of the turns and twists in life and politics as well as the genuine terrors of this moment. The war in Ukraine sparked by authoritarians trying to subject others to their will echoes the local US authoritarians who instead of tanks and missiles try to undermine democratic structures and human rights using deliberate misinformation, subversion of voting rights, legislative coups, extremist right judicial decrees, and demonizing those not cowering to your viewpoint. .