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...

Dear Red America, This is really hard to write. How about we start with the good things? Yes, that's it; remembering the good times makes everything feel better. Remember how thrilling it was when we first got together? We had something huge in common: big dreams of independence, founding a new republic, and we knew neither of us could do it solo. We needed each other. So we came together, hammered out some vows, and announced to the world that we were now in a relationship. We knew from the beginning that we were not the same, that we had to make allowance for differences, find ways to balance the power in the relationship. Some of the compromises seemed minor at the time: we of the Blue states had more people, and in a simple democracy, should've had more power; but you made it clear from the beginning that you were not willing to give up some of your more peculiar practices, and if we wanted this relationship to work, we had to concede power to you. T...

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...