This isn’t exactly a “goodbye cruel world” diary, as much as it is a passing on of some wisdom, the likes of which I think this site has been sorely lacking.
I wanted to write the diary myself, but found an article in The Atlantic, by Eliot A. Cohen that says what I feel, and more eloquently.
It is one thing to hate. It is one thing to snark. It is one thing to make fun. It is one thing to wring our hands in worry. It is quite another thing to lift ourselves above the daily fray and get some goddamned perspective.
Wise perspective.
Take this Atlantic article as a call to arms. Take it as an anxiety pill. Take it as some much needed self-reflection. Whatever you need right now, and whatever drives your call to keeping our democracy alive and well.…….
Here goes: www.theatlantic.com/…
Americans Are Rising to This Historic Moment
The commitment of ordinary citizens to democratic ideals is being tested each day—and its enduring strength is containing the damage of Trump’s presidency.
A writer usually itches to rewrite any article that is more than a week old: I confess to no such temptation with my first article for The Atlantic, published a year ago. I stand by every word. I think now as I did then that Trump will not grow into his job, “because the problem is one of temperament and character;” I continue to think that to be associated with him “will be for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction;” and most importantly, “There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”
In the country writ large, the Democrats seem to have a new infusion of energy from all kinds of people, to include minorities who now have an even livelier appreciation of what the right to vote means, once-Republican leaning women disgusted by the president’s own sexual predations, and young veterans of America’s wars who want to bring into Congress the spirit of service that they exhibited on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
My parents’ generation experienced the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the social chaos of the 1960s. My grandparents—who came to this country from lands that the president would undoubtedly term “shitholes,” left behind pogroms, and survived all that, plus World War I and the great influenza pandemic. Set against those experiences, it is an unworthy whinge to complain about what Americans are living through today. The United States has survived much worse than one contemptible president and a craven political party; its resilience is built into the bones of its political system. What it is going through now is simply a good, hard shake. And there need be nothing to be afraid of in that.