“Dont worry, I’ll keep your chair warm for me.”
“As silly and as wise” — My first exhortation for the coming years is pretty well summed up by my reflection on Meacham’s And There Was Light, which is about ourselves long before it’s about elected officials.
Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.
Thousands of bits of paper are falling into ballot-boxes today, all over the country. It is a little thing, and can be done very easily, but mighty consequences may hang on the result.
—Private Wilbur Fisk of the Second Vermont, November 1864
Back in the fall of 2016, I was taking a creative writing class just for fun. This was my election day poem… just for fun 🤓:
Civic Duty
When I walk from the booth tonight,
I need not feel distress.
I’ll drop the ballot in the box,
Then smile and say, ‘God bless.'
No news or ranting talk show host
Will fill me with regret;
As engine turns, release a sigh,
It’s finished now, why fret?
So home I’ll go, where even though
They wait, and wait, and wait,
I’ll raise my feet in solitude,
Márquez, and me, and fate.
And when I rest my weary head,
My mind will be at ease.
For I can say, without a doubt,
I did not aim to please.
In silence, then, take time to pray,
The Lord my soul to keep.
If Trump should win before I wake,
My soul, Lord, you may take.
Drive-by sunset, where the Sheepscot branches into Back River
Nick Catoggio:
We deserve what we get now. And I do mean “we.” I deserve it too.…
I regret, and will always regret, that I didn’t recognize until very late what the conservative movement was becoming. I plead stupidity, not malice: Not until Trumpmania exploded in 2015 did it dawn on me that adherents of populist conservatism were happy to jettison the conservatism so long as the populist demagoguery got turned up to 10.
Whatever minuscule contribution I may have made toward us arriving at this moment, I’m sorry for it. All I can do to atone is make another minuscule contribution toward trying to lead us away and accept that, whatever Trump has planned, I’m part of the “we” that has it coming.
Wendell Berry:
[That the ends justify the means] is a vicious illusion. For the discipline of ends is no discipline at all. The end is preserved in the means; a desirable end may perish forever in the wrong means. Hope lives in the means, not the end.
I’m fine with hyperlinks — I use them, I find it useful when others use them. (I am an addicted pursuer of footnotes.) But not when the hyperlink is a stand-in for context! It’s infuriating to have no idea what’s being referred to unless I click the link. And the newsletter writers from The Dispatch are the worst offenders. If I completely refused to assume any references, it would take me a week to read half of one email from Nick Catoggio.
End of rant.