Yesterday

Like many of us I am trying to wrap my head around the events of yesterday. The quick answers, the easy answers, are that we saw the ugly and deadly results of overheated rhetoric, the weaponization of perceived white, male grievance (a mild form actually), and one particular individual who has never respected our ideals, our institutions, nor the workings of our government. This is what happens when a desperate, malignant and sociopathic narcissist, has no other avenues left, though I would happily accept a surreptitious flight out of Dover. It could have been far worse. This is where we have been going as a culture for a number of years now. Yet on the same day of this tragedy, as the death knell of American exceptionalism sounded, the despoliation of our gleaming and grand capitol, one of the deepest, reddest, most racist and anti-Semitic states in our union, elected a black son of a cotton picker and a Jewish man to the Senate, mostly due to the toil of one, determined black woman. This is America at its best and its worst. This one day. And then the next day, early in the morning, we certified the presidential election results, elevating our first female, black and Asian vice president to the second highest office in the land. The contradictions run deep, painfully so.

The Founders assembled our government with the highest ideals in mind. Learning from the fall of the Roman Republic and the grand ideas of philosophers, they pieced together the most important lessons of world history in order to create a government that was above reproach. However even they were not immune from their own…