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© 2021 Sophie Park
Jim Walsh, Nahant, MA
Jim Walsh, 77, lives in Nahant and has been politically active since the 1960s. He regularly attends a weekly Black Lives Matter stand out in Swampscott. We spoke two days after the election, and while he was feeling hopeful about the results, the days before had been fraught. He shared a dream that he had the night of Nov. 3.
“Somewhere in the middle of the night I had a dream. Donald Trump was creating a video to be shown to the nation. The setting was the Lincoln Monument at night with the kind of dramatic lighting found in monuments to great men. He was alone. Lincoln was gone but his setting remained. Trump’s face was pleasant, friendly, open, smiling, like a remembered uncle or father. He looked out at the audience he knew would be there.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I won.” His affect was benign.
‘And I’m going to enjoy the next four years.’ Then he raised his eyebrows just a bit and cocked his head and said, ‘Fuck you.’
And he rose from his seat, now empty, once occupied by Abraham Lincoln. The Trump I dreamed was not the Trump I knew. He was not angry, nervous, insecure, sputtering nonsense about his brilliance and accomplishments. He might be the Trump that others thought they knew or he might be the mythic Trump that existed only in his own imagination.”
What’s at stake in Jim’s life is the environment and what it might mean for his grandchildren. “Like the virus, climate change doesn’t care whether you’re a democrat or republican, whether you live in North America or South America. It’s coming and it is devastaing. One of the great human qualities that we should focus on is foresight. We can look ahead and see what’s going to happen, because we look at the science. This is what we seem to have lost, you know, people saying, ‘I only care about what’s happening right now. If I’m not getting flooded, who cares?’ So I have to worry. And that’s where I worry about my grandchildren.”
For Jim, reading brings solace. He spent the evening of the election reading a new JFK biography.
“I sat downstairs. My wife was upstairs shaking her fist at the TV. And I said, ‘You know, nothing’s going to change. So I used that time to read. One of the aspects, I think, that people should understand about history is that ‘You look back at history, and you think that if you were there you could have predicted what would happen. But you can’t. You don’t know what’s going to happen, which is why action is important.”