FEBRUARY 26, 2025 – This morning I flew to New York for a fix of music by the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner—his seventh symphony to be performed Friday by the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall (stay tuned and in tune).
Aboard the flight I reserved an aisle seat to allow for easier walks up and down the middle to ward against blot clots and to facilitate a quick exit at the end of the flight. As it turned out, so many people were hacking and coughing (unmasked) aboard the aircraft, I (fully masked) kept to my seat and reading material for the entire trip. I’ve been “riding aisle” on every one of my plane rides of the past two and a half years, and each time I’ve regretted that I didn’t go with a window seat.
Today the people with window seats in my row followed the pattern of so many other passengers aboard our flight: they pulled down the shades, closing out my view, as narrow as it was from my aisle seat. Aren’t you curious about the what’s outside? I wanted to ask them. Aren’t you interested in seeing the earth as it appears from 36,000 feet of altitude? Don’t you want to see the Great Lakes from the air? And Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, a sliver of western New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the greatest bonus territory in the world, New York City? Or if some of that terrain is hidden under the clouds . . . what about the clouds themselves from an angle you can’t duplicate from the ground?
But no, people were obsessed with their tablets, onboard entertainment choices, and other distractions occupying the cubic foot of space above their laps. What a waste, I thought, of a wonderful viewing platform!
Hours later at my sister and brother-in-law’s Upper Westside apartment, conversation turned inevitably to politics and the state of our nation. We felt no need to apologize to ourselves for wading deep into these matters. The country, after all, is in crisis. If prior to the crisis some of us weren’t “political,” now everyone has to be, since all of us will be deeply affected by whaat’s happening.
We discussed in earnest such particulars as House passage of the budget plan/resolution late yesterday and the prospect of cuts to Medicaid, only to have the latest headlines—Musk’s commanding presence at today’s initial cabinet meeting and European fears of the Administration’s sellout to Putin–overwhelm us. Then came the kicker: an email from one of our Swedish cousins listing Trump’s connections to Russia dating back to 1987 and the chance that he was being developed as a KGB asset; that he has been compromised; that he has laundered Russian crime money; that Russian money bailed Trump out of bankruptcy . . . and so on and so on. This all raises the question, has Putin not only won his war against Ukraine, but has he essentially seized control of the United States?
After pondering this possibility against the backdrop of President Musk’s evisceration of federal agencies and chainsaw-battle ax approach to federal employees and expenditures, I began to think that metaphorically, at least, my fellow passengers aboard today’s flight were right in closing the shades, closing the eyelids of a deceased entity—American democracy.
What I’m hearing from observant—and frightened—Europeans is that America, dead or alive, will no longer be trusted or respected. One columnist in Sweden’s largest newspaper went even further:
In the last few weeks, something has happened. [. . .] I had enough. Maybe it was when Vice President JD Vance gave his speech in Munich, when he criticized European countries for the way we run our democracies. It was just too much, that such criticism came from JD Vance, one of those who most loudly repeated the lie that the 2020 US election was stolen. How can you first participate in such a huge de-democratization campaign in your own country and then go to another and have views on how they manage their democracy? Maybe that’s where it happened. Or when Trump called a European, democratically elected president a dictator. Or when the US tried to block a wording in the UN that Russia started the war against Ukraine. But it happened anyway—I realized that I hate America. [. . .] What I never thought would happen, happened. Now when I think of the United States, I am not only filled with frustration or concern, I feel disgust. What a lousy country. I want nothing to do with it.
This turn of events makes me angry and sad but mostly sad. If I could, I’d jump to a window seat and raise the shade—raise the shade covering the view of America’s future.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
