The vast momentum of our ship of state has carried us willy-nilly beyond the Trump administration and into the Biden presidency. I am reminded of lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward FitzGerald.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
In the much less poetic current parlance, “it is what it is, get over it.”
Government is like the weather, there are nice days and days that, one way or another, aren’t great. Off and on, I have spent half my long life with someone I didn’t like in residence in the White House.
With some care I can probably avoid large negative impacts on my personal life. I have made the choice to refuse to be angry about things like this I cannot control, I invite you to make the same choice.
My nation, of which I am especially fond, may not be so fortunate. About that I am not angry - the wound is self-inflicted - but I am certainly sad.
Meanwhile the momentum I wrote of will likely enable us to survive yet another unfortunate retrograde hiatus in our national development. The real question is how many of these steps backwards the nation can absorb before the damage is irreversible? The answer, I fear, is something we won’t know until it is too late to recover.
