Good Morning.
Yesterday I had a tuna sandwich in my favorite chair while I watched a few minutes of early afternoon news, none of it even slightly encouraging. Government workers on the lower end of the pay scale are buying their groceries at food pantries, selling their belongings, and borrowing
money from relatives make their car payments. People are more worried than normal about flying because of TSA cutbacks; in my family at least two of us prefer to be carried on and off an airliner in a semi-conscious state even when everything is working the way it should be.
The new Speaker of the House has made it clear that the State of the Union address should be postponed because the state of the union is a mess. The official reason is that security isn't up to snuff at the moment, but the real deal is that the thought of people cheering the Commander-in-Chief when he parades into the House chamber during a government shutdown is inappropriate. The C-in-C responded to the suggestion of a delay by canceling the Speaker's foreign travel. Meanwhile, his attorney, the former mayor of New York, has now said that maybe some of the president's cohorts actually did fool around with the Russians. It's hard to keep up but a sense of humor helps. You can't make this stuff up.
I am reminded, with no humor whatever, of the chaos that happened during the 1960s. We began the decade by electing a Catholic president whose detractors wrung their hands over what they feared would be the certain installation of the Pope in the West Wing. People who used birth control would be jailed on sight and everyone, regardless of faith, would be required to abstain from meat on Friday. None of it happened, of course. We got something we called Camelot until President Kennedy was assassinated three years into his first term for reasons that have never been made clear. I was a junior in college at the time and we were sent home because nobody knew what sort of larger attack might be coming. We had already been through the Cuban Missile Crisis when we honestly thought we might be on the verge of nuclear war and the annihilation of the human race. It puts the pettiness of today's political climate, frustrating as it is, into at least some sort of perspective.
During the Sixties, we got into a controversial war that tore the country to shreds. The violence in the streets was frequent, bloody, and televised. We had the Civil Rights Movement where the worst instincts of humanity were on display all over the south and occasionally elsewhere. The brutal clashes that took place over those two issues alone make the childishness among lawmakers today look at least survivable. We also had two more assassinations during the decade from hell: Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis and Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. How the country got through the year 1968 I will never know but we did. People went to work, paid their bills, mowed the lawn, took the kids to piano lessons and baseball practice, cooked burgers on the grill, went fishing, played golf, played with the cat, prayed a lot, and kept going.
That doesn't mean blunder in foreign policy that would threaten world order couldn't happen tomorrow, but for the moment a good formula seems to be to pretend that everything is okay by doing normal things and hope we get through all this foolishness. I am convinced that we will, but fasten your seat belts because the next few weeks are gonna be doozies. Have an ice cream cone.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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