Midlife Meditation

It's a divide as old as civilization. A town mouse paid a visit to her country cousin, who served her a traditional country dinner. The city mouse turned up her nose at the humble cuisine, telling her cousin, "You should come visit me in town. You'd be blown away by how rich the food is." The country mouse took her up on the offer, and found that the food was every bit as delicious as her cousin had promised. Of course, this being a town, there were dogs roaming the streets, one of which chased the mice into a hole. "The hell with this!" said the country mouse. "No fancy city food is worth becoming  a meal for one of those monsters!" And with that, she headed for home. Aesop told the story 2600 years ago, but he drew on traditions already ancient in his time. Humans first began to practice agriculture 12,000 years ago. It took another 6000 years for villages to evolve into the first cities. At every stage in the process, there must have been...

Dear happily victorious Republican party, Congratulations on your electoral upset. You've been working toward this for a very long time (just over eight years, I believe), and you must be enormously relieved that all that effort has finally paid off. I understand your eagerness to dive in and get to work overhauling American democracy. I also get your annoyance with all of us in the opposition. It must really suck that we don't share your glee. Of course you want us to just get over with it, to simply accept the election results and pretend everything's just fine, just like you did eight years ago. Oh, wait. Come to think of it, that's not how you handled things then, is it? In fact, if memory serves, you launched a campaign of obstruction that soured all the joy and hope of the Obama election. You launched a grassroots movement that was a model of inclusiveness, in that you welcomed all sorts of people who hated our first Black President: racists, homo...