Be Not Afraid

This story is a chapter in a new Plough book, Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year, a collection of the best essays and reflections published on breakingground.us, a web commons set up during the pandemic to probe society’s assumption and imagine what a better future might require. This volume, written in real time during a year that revealed the depths of our society’s fissures, provides a wealth of reflections and proposals on what should come after.

The machines whirred in my father’s hospital room, the monitors beeped, the drips dripped. Through the window the Sandia Mountains shone crimson as the Albuquerque sun made its evening trip earthward, filling the room with warm, golden light. It was January, and a dusting of white snow lay gently atop the peaks, softening the desert’s crimson intensity and serving as a reminder of water and of seasons. And in the cardiac wing of Lovelace Hospital, in a dull stretch of city set between the mountains and the Rio Grande, my father lay dying in a hospital bed.

I got the call just days before from his girlfriend of nearly two decades. “Your dad’s back in the hospital,” she quavered over the phone, “probably for the last time.” She’d spent at least fifteen years hating me, so her willingness to make contact itself demonstrated a sense of urgency. My dad’s congestive heart failure had made him a regular visitor to the cardiac ward for as long as I can remember, and he’d undergone countless surgeries and procedures to try and bring life back to a withering organ determined to quit. It was a long, ugly fight, and he was finally losing.

Photograph by Kelly Sikkema

My dad was a difficult guy, and our relationship was strained. My parents had separated when I was six, my mom taking me and my sister with her to Florida while my brother stayed with my dad in Marion, Arkansas. A mutual silence held throughout most of my teens, broken only by my reaching out to him through email in my early twenties, in a spirit of curiosity and clemency. It was a strange reencounter, an adult son getting to know his dad for the first time as a person rather than simply a parent. We wrote each other about our lives and dreams; he shared insights on music, gleaned from a lifetime of being a virtuoso tenor saxophonist. But I was soon surprised to find that one of every three emails he sent had to do with politics: the Libertarian Party newsletter, Ron Paul articles, conjectures about Obama’s birth certificate. (In March of 2011, he sent a wave of articles excitedly weighing the possibility of Donald Trump running for president.)

As the years passed and we grew closer, my dad’s obsession with outrage media intensified. Most of our discussions would include a tirade about Obama, a wingnut book recommendation, an anguished plea for people to “wake up.” I watched how this obsession gradually alienated him from nearly everyone he knew; friends and family fell by the wayside as he crawled deeper into a cave of conspiratorial logic and monomania. His mind had become a receptacle for slogans and buzzwords that circulated within conservative-branded political media. And while I sat holding his hand in his hospital room, stumbling through the last few opportunities for conversation we’d ever have, his attention regularly drifted to the television overlooking his bed that played Fox News and OAN on a constant loop. Even in the active unfolding of his death, with the certainty of his end staring him right in the face, his consciousness remained absorbed in the engrossing frivolity of the TV screen.

After he died, I learned that my dad – who, at the end of his life, had hardly any income and no savings, and who lived off the generosity and naïveté of his partner – had been sending most of his meager Social Security checks to the NRA, Project Veritas, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, and Hillsdale College. My dad had neither a firearm to his name, nor a college degree. What he did have, however, was a deep, foundation-rattling anxiety about the world ubiquitous among boomers that made him – and countless others like him – easily exploitable by media conglomerates whose business model relies on sowing hysteria and reaping the reward of advertising revenue.

Read the rest of “Be Not Afraid” by Joseph M. Keegin