It hangs. Quiet yet unnerving by it’s very presence. It has been gathering since before the election. Now, post-election, it sits thick and palpable.
There have been palls before. I recall the one that hung after Reagan was shot and when the space shuttle exploded. It could be argued that the pall that gripped the world with the tragedy of 9/11 still hangs a bit… a good 15 years after the fact.
The first I remember experiencing one was when I was all of 4 years old when Kennedy was assassinated. Then again when both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King met similar fates one after another.
All these palls were global and were born from tragedy. Mourning and uncertainty woven into it’s fabric. For the most part the thread count of the former surpassing the latter.
These palls are known to lift or dissipate into “getting on with it” or via a positive event that shifts the zeitgeist. The current one may not.
You see, there is also a different type of pall… like the one I experienced in 1969. It started before the elections in Malaysia that year. The thread count of uncertainty dominated in the cowl of that one. One could almost feel a low rumble sparking intermittent glows and pops of anger like the bubbles in a lava lake.
That particular feeling of unease was justified. Soon after the elections, on May the 13th of that year… bloody race riots broke out.
The current pall feels similar… and uncomfortably familiar.