The Era of American Numbness
Published in the Yale Herald, by Julia Schroers
April 18, 2021
Watergate, once America’s most scandalous political affair, has got nothing on 2020. In fact, America’s pain tolerance for corruption has increased exponentially since Nixon’s resignation. The past few years have made us immune to words and phrases like “impeachment,” “abuse of power,” and “deception” as they cycle through every headline non-stop. But up until this point, Watergate was the scandal of all scandals, which set America on the path to conspiracy and coup d’etat. Even so, the landmark prosecution and resignation of President Nixon has faded into the history books for anyone who’s just trying to get through the front page of The New York Times every morning. What happened at the Watergate Hotel? What led President Nixon to resign? And what set the stage for the massive cover-up, and all the similarly massive cover-ups since?
On The Train
by Julia Schroers, 2022
3rd Place Winner Guilford Poetry Guild High School Poets Contest
On the five hour train ride
In the four person seating section
Beside my mother and brother and I
Sits a very important man with a very important job and
stone marbled gray hair and
a large container of papaya.
He has one child–a daughter in college– who
he speaks about in the way someone who has never had a houseplant before carries it: with breath held and eyes wide.
She is in college but when she was little she was such a great child to travel with,
because she would sleep on trains–
He slides himself closer to the window and taps a stoney finger against the throbbing
seat of the train and
Is shy and
Makes a joke about himself
And offers us pieces of papaya.
The important man lives alone, he has big windows he tells us,
Big windows and an empty house,
And lots of extra papaya and only the housekeeper to talk to,
The housekeeper who saved up all her money from cleaning the big empty house to
Visit her bloodstained one, the house of her mother, in a war-torn motherland,
And she got all excited and visited the cratered streets,
only to get trapped between the bombs and
Sent the important man into a frenzy, calling up the ambassadors and other important
people and stayed up three nights until he got the housekeeper out of the bullets and–
He smiles– she arrives back to clean and to
Talk to him.
The train rocks rhythmically:
He offers us a piece of papaya, a piece of a joke,
A piece something from the loneliest corners of his empty house,
A few unimportant, rusted words of conversation.
