Midlife Meditation

April, 1999: fulfilling a parenting bucket list item, I take my almost-10-year-old daughter to meet our Congressman, David Wu, at his tiny office across the street from the Capitol. I know the exact moment I became interested in politics. It was January, 1968. I was in the first grade. As the New Hampshire primary drew near, presidential candidates were roaming up and down the state, holding rallies in any building that would host them. One of those buildings was the Pleasant Street United Methodist Church in the border town of Salem, of which my father, in his first full-time Methodist appointment, was the pastor. The candidate was Richard Nixon. I got the morning off from school so I could attend the rally, which featured young women dancing in straw hats. After the rally, Pat Nixon called my brother Jon a "beautiful baby." Thanks to that event, I was in Nixon's pocket for the next six years. Watergate did not move my devotion to him: instead, I felt sorry for ...

Why doesn't he care? From the moment he began campaigning for President, Donald Trump's polls have been abysmal. As a people, Americans really don't care for his lying, bragging, pandering, insulting, bald-faced demagoguery. A significant majority of us see through find the man offensive, and believe he's dragging the nation down to ruin. Since taking office, his approval numbers have declined to a point where no President in the last 70 years has been so disliked so soon after winning election. American politicians live by the poll or die by the poll. Senators, Congresspersons, Governors, state legislators, mayors, city councillors, school board members--whatever power any of them has is utterly dependent on being popular enough to win the next election. In many cases, they can count on their base--the rabidly partisan contingent who would vote for a yellow dog rather than a candidate from the other party--to put them over the top. This is especially true of the...

For some reason, I'm losing my appetite for leftovers. 4:30 a.m., and I can't sleep. Actually, I've been awake since 3:00; I just decided ninety minutes was long enough to think about what's happening, and that maybe writing about it would help me ease back into dreamland. (Sidebar: since going back to full-time teaching, my body has been hardwired to get up at 5:00 a.m. I now set my alarm for 5:15, but rarely need it. I just can't stay asleep.) I know I'm not the only American lying awake in the dark, my mind churning with fear and fury. There are many of us--if not a majority, certainly at least a sizable plurality--who are terrified not just by who's been elected President, but by the very fact that he was even nominated for this office, let alone that so many millions of our friends and relations voted for him. No, he didn't win the popular vote, in fact lost it by more than two million votes. But that's still 62 million Americans ...

Great wish list. Too bad Santa isn't running for President. Before I launch the rant, here are my qualifications: 1) I first realized I was a socialist in 1980, when a conservative friend asked me some leading questions to which the answer, for me, was obviously yes (I can't remember what they were, but I expect they had to do with federal regulations, labor unions, and the social safety net). "Congratulations," he said, his voice heavy with irony, "you're a socialist." "Huh," I replied, "if believing that government should protect the interests of ordinary people against corporate interests, then I'm all in!" Or something like that. 2) I'm no Hillary Clinton fan.  There are many reasons, but the clincher was her evasiveness around the obviously political evolution of her views on marriage equality in a 2014 interview with Terry Gross. The rhetorical knots she tied herself in were eerily reminiscent of her husband...