Midlife Meditation

Shattered dreams. I'm so sorry, guys. I know how it feels. I know because I've been there. I've built my life around a single goal, allowed it to influence every decision, worked so hard for it that all other priorities fell away. For me, that goal was to be ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church. It took me ten years to achieve it, then just five for it to fall away. It was my second divorce that really drove the message home: it was unhealthy for both me and everyone I loved for me to continue clinging to that goal, and so I left ministry, initially on a leave of absence, but finally, two years later, as teaching began to open up for me, for good. Giving up on that dream was as painful as either divorce, and for similar reasons: it wasn't just what I wanted; it was, to a very large degree, who I was.\ So I understand what Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump must be feeling right now. All three of them staked their political legacies on ...

Endangered species. Kansas. Montana. Georgia. South Carolina. Four Congressional vacancies. Four special elections. Four opportunities for Democrats to turn President Trump's historic unpopularity into a warning to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill: if you value your job, start representing the majority of your constituents, rather than pandering to the wealthy few. But if those elections were referenda on the Presidency, the net result fell far short of those national figures: every one of them went to the Republican candidate. Democratic responses run the gamut of disappointment to despair to fury at party leaders. As understandable as those feelings may be, I think they're all misguided. Don't get me wrong: I very much wanted every one of those elections to go the other way, to send four strong messages to Congress that the American people are fed up with Republican efforts to kill the ACA and transform its funding into massive tax cuts for the 1%. But in every...