Midlife Meditation

The 2016 election results by county. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the  Union  to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South. -- Abraham Lincoln, 1858 It's a terrible feeling. I first experienced it in 1994. That was the year of coming apart, as my first marriage unraveled completely. My gut knew it long before my head was ready to accept it, and the more certain my intuition was of the great cataclysm ahead, the harder my mind labored to turn back. Th...

I get it. Like most progressive West Coast Americans, I'm grief-stricken at what's happening to my country, horrified that so many who consider themselves patriots could vote for a racist misogynist authoritarian windbag, and furious that our antiquated electoral system awarded the most powerful office in the world to a man who actually received far less than even a plurality of the popular vote. As with my long-standing beef with United Methodism, this leads me, like so many in my circle, to contemplate seceding: taking our vital economy, our big-hearted people, our earth-friendly attitude, and letting the xenophobic rural remainder fend for themselves. Let's see how well they do without us. There's nothing new about this idea. Various configurations of West Coast states (sometimes including British Columbia), joined together as a nation of their own, have been floated by futurists and environmentalists going well back into the last century. The result goes by a va...