Today. And the Day After.

Either way it goes, there will be beauty. And ferocity.

HEADS:  It is, in the final analysis, about resilience.

On this blue-sky October day, less than two weeks before our great fork in the road, I went outside early in the morning, to do as I do most mornings, and spread out some seed for the birds.  Pre-caffeine, three-quarters conscious, I nonetheless became briskly aware that it was a beautiful fall day here in the Northeast, bright and stunning, half late summer-like, half autumnal splendor.  While looking about from our back deck, I had this brief, clarifying thought: 

It will be beautiful some mornings after November 5^th, and it will be stormy or less than pleasant on other days from the second week of November on.  Life -- big, raw, capital L Life -- will roll on, as it always does. 

Now what was just stated could be seen as thoroughly banal, a lullaby of sorts for anxious, democracy-loving adults.  Sure.  But I stand by it.  I stand by it as a person who has been around for some time, who has seen more ups and downs than someone in their twenties or thirties; having witnessed many American horrors, and many more national rebirths.

We are, after all, an inventive, resourceful, resilient people.  

TAILS:  It is, in the final analysis, about national sanity.

We are all witness to our national fracture.  It is surely not an everyday spat.  It is a rift so severe that it is the San Andreas fault of societal ruptures.  It is a rip that is ugly, wildly contentious, and irrational by its very nature.  It will likely lead to pockets of armed rebellion and larger assemblies of righteous resistance.  It will surely leave a terrible scar. 

We are, at this juncture in our history, fuming and ready to ignite, beyond distrustful, each side of the other, and on the cusp of divorce.  Many of us are panic-stricken, and quite mad – and we’re talking about the mad born out of madness. 

Fierce winds have blown down the rational pillars.  Much of the country has gone berserk.  National sanity?  Like Elvis, it has left the building.

(Now, dear reader, allow us to pause and reflect on our reactions.  If you support Donald Trump, you are tallying up the ways in which Democrats, liberals and the Left are causing this awful rift.  They, so you think, are not quite grounded in reality, and continually judge, dismiss and shut down people not like them.  Democrats are quicker to diss America and find fault with it over certain European countries or New Zealand, not to mention terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah, illegals, cross-border criminals, and unchecked urban thieves and thugs.  Hell, they don’t even like rural white people!

If you support Kamala Harris and most Democrats, you are likely thinking:  are you kidding me?!  MAGA, the far Right and spineless Republicans who are afraid to tell the damning truth about their party’s unhinged leader are leading us into an authoritarian regime, chaos and lawlessness, and worse -- American fascism.  They care more about a cult of personality than the Constitution, and at least a third of them think more highly of Putin and Viktor Orban than they do Oprah and Obama.  They put guns before little children and conspiracy over science.  These, you think, are dangerous people who have lost their moral compass, having morphed from conservatives and once considerate religious folk into raving radicals and ultra-nationalistic brutes.) 

Perhaps I’ve left out a few choice bullet points about each tribe, but you get the picture.  Anyway, we have trouble, right here in River City, and like my bright, good-natured, reliably rational son said to me when I asked what he saw ahead, he calmly stated:  Well, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

THE CLOCK IS TICKING AND LESS THAN 2 WEEKS OUT, I have no idea who will pull off the win.   But I do know a few things.  I know that most Democrats and the majority of lifelong Republicans are better people than the opposing side says they are.  There is no less decency and human feeling in Iowa, Kansas, Utah, North Dakota, South Carolina and Louisiana than there is in Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland.  Will this core decency overcome fear, disinformation, conspiracy and rampant mistrust?  Can the flickers of optimism ignite, and shine a light?  No one knows.

But I do know there will be no magic healing by next month’s Thanksgiving dinner. 

More than half of us will not accept Donald Trump back in the White House, whether he wins by 8 or 80 Electoral College votes.  We will shudder, protest and push back in every single way it’s possible to push.  He will remain utterly reviled by over 50% of the population.  Like foul deli meat, we’ll immediately want to spit him out.

Meanwhile, close to half of America will believe a Kamala Harris victory was either rigged, fenagled or imposed upon us by the Deep State, mainstream media and rich Hollywood Lefties.  They will see only a major mutilation of the nation’s fabric and a trampling of the American Way.  Too many fear further decline or some ominous coming darkness.  Some will find her presidency a perversion; they would be likely to accent the “dam” in Madame President.

The endless noise and rancor we see and hear now will amplify in certain ways.  The awful discord will surely not go away.  And yet… 

MOST OF US will navigate our lives, loves, jobs and studies with some very American grit, a little grace, practical tinkering, and shreds of optimism.  We did it, slowly, after 9/11, amidst the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, after 2016, after the January 6th insurrection, during Covid, through massive fires, floods, and storms.  We came through.  We’ll do it once more.  Again, we’re remarkably inventive, resourceful and resilient.  Americans find a way.  We eventually overcome.  We bounce back.

THE EARTH WILL CONTINUE TO SPIN, and the sun will rise and shine (sure, a little bit hotter than it did 30 years ago).  And we should know this:  no side will “win” once and for all (think the Civil War; it lasted only 4 years, and 159 years later, it’s still not over.  It is still being fought in our larger culture, our state laws, our voting patterns, and our distinct worldviews).   That said, in the last century and a half much progress has occurred, and there’s more to come.

The author Alice Walker said, "In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect."  You have your own sense of what this means; you can intuit it because you’ve experienced it.  When we are lost or dizzy, it is not because the world has lost its way or that its 1,000 m.p.h. revolutions make us dizzy.  It’s just us chickens.  Sure, nature can be a wild and terrible beauty.  That said, nature not only sustains us, it has an innate tendency toward wholeness.  Almost all of nature has a discernable bent toward healing and reclamation.

Despite ourselves, we’re a part of this wholeness.  Despite human folly and endless busy mind, we remain nature, too.  As such, there is a natural tendency in us -- just like water entering the roots and travelling up the tree’s trunks -- toward nourishment and that which is restorative.  We too are designed to recover and move, however imperfectly, toward completeness. 

Of course, sometimes our path there is twisty, circuitous, or downright loopy. 

Like now, in America.  These are not sipping lemonade on the front porch-times.  These are crazy, disjointed, noisy days and nights.  We’re living in hurling rotten eggs and tomatoes at the stage-times.  We’re filled to the brim with acrimony.  On a good day, we’re nutty, ridiculous, downright childish.  And on bad days, well...  You probably see what I see.

Will it simmer down?  Will it become something else, something more unified and mostly sympathetic?  Specifically, when will America the beautiful become America the benevolent again?  When will we go from, ‘I think you’re nuts and I hate your guts’ to ‘I see the world much differently from you, but I still care about you’? 

When, for God’s sake and our own, will denizens of two imperfect kingdoms become one shuffled deck of colorful citizens who still recognize each other?  It won’t be by Thanksgiving 2024, and it probably won’t be by Christmas 2025.  But it will happen.

FIRST, a very divisive demagogue and disruptive chaos agent must leave the stage.  But with him or without him, the rest of must want it to happen.  And then vote for it to happen.  You know, by selecting admirable individuals to represent us, incorporating more rank choice voting, and listening to the voices that seek some common ground and promote our shared humanity.

But today, in our politics, it’s not that.  It’s the barely tolerable vs. the intolerably awful.  And each side only sees the awful in the other.  It sad, bordering on tragic, this, our house divided.  It is many things -- but sustainable it is not.

FOR NOW, WE VOTE.  Also, we walk our dogs, ride our horses, garden, hike our grand parks and otherwise head out into nature.  Because old Willy Shakespeare was right:  One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Let us pray for, or visualize, more peace and sanity.  May this damnable noise start to subside by the holiday season, and surely by next spring, and may we come to see in each other more our brothers and sisters than our tribal foes.  And may we own up to what is precious, which are surely these two things:  our loved ones and our democracy.