We All Live in Phantom Country Now

Summary

The grief we feel for stolen futures and lost pasts can be compared to the “phantom limb” syndrome experienced by those injured in the line of duty.

A haunted house. A ghost. A spirit. A phantom.

We know these things aren’t real, but when you’re anxious and afraid they sure seem so. And anyway, the fear is real. It’s a disturbing feeling, having no control in a fluid and uncertain situation. We begin to doubt that we were ever in control.  

As populations around the globe fall under the sway of populist strong men, it seems more and more like we’re surrounded by phantoms. We are haunted by pasts we have lost, futures that have been stolen. Shell-shocked that a few renegade men could win such favor among our fellow citizens, we turn off the news to regroup and reconsider our options.

As we struggle to find the plot in this absurdist play of partisan politics, perhaps we can learn from those who have been wounded in the theater of war. In this historical moment, the body politic itself is wounded. These days, our surreal experience in watching the daily news is like the story of an injured soldier writ large. If those wounded, even captured, in wartime can return home to lead through example, their integrity still intact, then we too can surely survive this moment and thrive again.

The Pain of Phantom Pasts and Futures

When a soldier loses a limb, it can still hurt despite the reality of its absence. Lack of control causes pain in a hand or a leg that isn’t there anymore. It’s frozen in place right where it was at the moment of its loss. You want to move it, but you can’t.

Combat veterans with this “phantom limb” syndrome are a special, and especially tragic, case of something more common. When someone you love dies, it hurts because that relationship is forever frozen in place and, try as you might, you can’t regain control and make it real again. We have to recreate a new version of ourselves that matches the new reality. The years we’d planned together for our shared future are no longer possible. Those futures, too, are frozen in place, and we have to start again.

In the same way that an injured soldier must adapt to a new body, a wounded nation must likewise reconstruct its sense of identity. a culture at war with itself no longer hangs together as one piece. A sense of integrity is lost. Each little sect grieves for the version of its past that appears frozen in place, as well as for the future that is equally painful in its irrecoverable absence.

For several energized months in late 2024, I imagined our first-ever elected female President. I imagined a huge majority saying “No, we won’t go back.” For me, and for many others, that dream is stuck in place, and it hurts when we try to move it. 

As a nation at war with itself, we grieve for different pasts and different futures. The past which is gone, and the anticipated future we suddenly lost, each give us pain as long as we cling to them. But like an individual, a body politic must grieve and start again if it is to survive. We must write a new story of a shared future—one that acknowledges today’s reality while aspiring toward a shared vision of tomorrow.

Becoming Un-Stuck (The Mirror Trick)

In physical therapy, veterans with a phantom limb can coax it to move by strategic placement of a mirror across from one’s remaining hand or foot. Our senses are tricked into seeing a limb that is not there, and a liberating connection is remade. It’s possible, in other words, to gain some control over a phantom. It takes extraordinary patience and persistence. Meanwhile, the new reality presses on. In any newly real body, personal or civic, a new person must emerge. A new citizen. In the hardest moments in our lives and in our collective history, we are at our best when we exercise our innate ability to adapt. We answer whatever challenge we face by becoming shapeshifters. 

Shapeshifting requires creativity. More of an art than a science, shapeshifting can let us regain some control over what we’ve lost. This is, in fact, one of the most important functions of art in times of crisis. The mirror of memory, strategically placed in songs or paintings, in scripted scenes of a film, or in creative slogans hand-written on makeshift protests signs, give us some control over the phantoms we face. We become shapeshifters by continuing to sing, create, and imagine. We cannot grieve if we lose faith in our own imagination.

Of course, some of us have more power than others in shaping the collective imagination. Right now, there is an imagined future whose champions are so loud their voices seem to silence any alternative. Ideas and books are censored, dedicated employees fired, agencies shut down, all in the name of some arcane vision of a technocratic utopia, thinly disguised as a campaign for the common man.

The imagined future many U.S. citizens once had, where in early 2025 the incoming President would be a true exemplar of the multiracial strength of our nation, is no longer possible. But those hopeful citizens were only wrong in terms of timing. They believed we were not going back, and they were not wrong. Though the opposition won, an apparent victory for red-hat slogans touting a dream of making America great “again,” on some level we all know that such an imagined past is likewise a phantom. That, of course, is why books are censored and agencies shut down in the first place. The mirror trick can’t work if you refuse to gaze into it—even less if we outlaw mirrors. And so, we find ourselves bewildered by our fellow citizens who quite literally wear the constant pain of a frozen past like a badge of honor. A bright red cap now signifies a willingness to trade an end to suffering for the cheap prize of righteous indignation.

The Department of Grievance and Entitlement

Interestingly, some people report experiencing the polar opposite of a phantom limb, feeling that one of their real-life appendages is not really part of them. Such people may suffer the reality of an actual limb that nevertheless feels like a foreign, alien thing. For such people, elective surgery is an option, however controversial that choice might be. For the body politic, things are even more complicated. Many of us feel that there is a new arm of government that simply does not belong—a Department of Grievance and Entitlement that is unfamiliar, foreign, frightening in its unwanted presence.

Of course, even if the courts manage to restrain the overreaching grasp of this new arm of government, the underlying problem will not go away. Restoring the integrity of the nation is more complicated than that. You can’t force people to care about others, or love their neighbors, if they believe to their core that the concept of “the common good” is a mere Ponzi scheme. But we can keep caring and loving anyway. Here I’m referring not to a kind of passivity or complicity, which Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as a “negative peace.” Instead, I’m speaking of the “positive peace” of non-violent yet courageous and outspoken resistance.

Becoming Shapeshifters

As shapeshifting artists, we can keep holding up a mirror for anyone who cares to see it. “Outsider” artists like Estéban Whiteside have been doing so for years now. More recently, Kennedy Center artists have used their performances to express dissent. We see many others doing this in courageous speeches at town halls, impromptu slogans on protest signs, and mass-scale efforts to withhold consumer dollars from businesses who flirt with complicity. People are improvising with whatever tools they’ve got. It is this creative, improvisational spirit that gives us leverage over the phantoms we face. It’s not our fate to grieve endlessly for an imagined past, or a lost future. When we find ourselves stuck in a phantom country, we survive and thrive when we become whatever kind of shapeshifting artist the moment calls us to be.