Okay, enough of this nonsense. I’ve allowed the current frightening times to scare me from speaking out. When two friends on opposite sides of the country wrote within two days wondering why this website has been even more than usual devoid of blogging activity, I guess I can’t continue to describe it as a site that nobody looks at. There’s two anyway.

Knowing my inclination toward news addiction, particularly political and particularly now, they rightly assumed I’d been riveted to TV coverage of November’s House Impeachment hearings and the subsequent swift Senate trial of the president, with its disappointing results, perhaps my two web followers hoped I’d have a properly snarky comment designed to lighten the ensuing horror. I’m sorry, can’t do snarky right now.

The morning after the Senate vote when only one brave Republican dared to honor the oath each member took at the proceeding’s outset – let’s hear it for Mitt Romney’s conscience and vow to cut him some slack on that hopefully now abandoned practice of driving with his dog in a crate atop his car – I stumbled downstairs to retrieve my newspaper in a masochistic urge to relive it all. A fellow tenant, a man in my demographic age-wise as well as political leaning, asked, “How are you this morning?” and I knew he wasn’t inquiring about my health. Shaking my head morosely, I answered, “Sad. I am so very sad for my country. And fearful.”

I went on to tell my neighbor that the only telegram Ed and I ever sent to the White House in more than half a century of marriage and shared daily consumption of the news, was in response to the Nixon Administration’s Saturday Night Massacre. I remember feeling proud and patriotic, and perfectly safe, knowing it was our Constitutional right to do so. Now, signing petitions, placing phone calls and demonstrating to express my opinions, I do it with a degree of trepidation: Am I opening myself up to being tracked? Harassed by people who disagree with me? Getting on a list of some kind?

A guest on Rachel Maddow’s program recently quoted another person who said this feels like Germany in 1939. I’ve always wondered how Hitler and Nazism happened in that advanced and richly cultured country, and yet in recent times it’s become more apparent. When friends ask how I can stand following the news, so much of it unpleasant, any answer I can give about our nation and history sounds priggish and certainly not conducive to continuing conversation.

I replied to my two web followers that every night I climb in bed, my mind buzzing with ideas and a determination to blog about them. But in the morning in front of the computer, I chicken out. And curse the situation that makes me afraid.