The Day After in Therapy

My friend Marlowe, who is just shy of 10 years old, is a master of Minecraft (to the uninitiated, a video game in which you can build entire universes, populated by various kinds of creatures, for your own creative pleasure or, in the combat mode, to survive). This past weekend, he took me on a tour of a new universe he had been working on. There was a monumental house with an airy upper room to read in and a lower room where there was a portal to the Netherworld, an endless, frightening red-hot mass. There was a lab building where a glowing furnace produced little skeletons that were immediately crushed. Several other beautiful structures, spanning a terrain of some hills next to a body of water … And in the middle of it all, glaringly and uncharacteristically obtrusive, a wall. “This is Trump’s wall,” he said. What? Why is there a Trump’s wall here? What made you think about it and put it in your world? “I don’t know,” he said. But then, “Look, it’s not a problem, it’s not in the way, I can walk on it.” And he showed me how he can. There was in fact a narrow path on top of the wall designed for walking.

It turned out later that in a class discussion after the election, some kids said they were afraid they would not be able to stay, in school, in New York, anywhere? Not necessarily the kids one might imagine. There were questions raised about many kinds of legitimacy. So he built a wall, in recognition and response, I guess, to what he had heard. And he built it such that it could be seen, painfully seen, but not such that it would really be an obstacle. A monument to scale rather than to be awed by. More of an aesthetic impediment in his otherwise wonderful world than a real problem. I wish I could do the same.

That wall appeared in my practice the day after the election, but it stretched from one end of the universe to the other. Somewhere else people celebrated, but my patients, almost without exception, stood in front of it disoriented, demoralized, frightened, a