MountainMornings

As I watched VP Kamala Harris certify all the votes yesterday, I felt sick to my stomach. She was standing while the Speaker of the House was sitting, was this normal? People were applauding. And all I could see were the interns and clerks, the young people who have to haul and count and manage the certification of Trump’s election. No one objected to the results; it was done the way it has always been done, a pro forma procedure, with a few exceptions.

I wondered how many of the legislators and their staff were there on the House floor, four years ago, when they had to run for their lives from an angry insurrectionist mob.

I’ve felt betrayed and defeated before. I think about my very first vote for president in 1968 for Eugene McCarthy. I was a college student living in Boston, and it was a tumultuous time. Our leaders had been assassinated that same year, first Martin and then Bobby. We wanted the War in Vietnam to end, and Richard Nixon had promised to do just that. But he was a duplicitous, disingenuous politician. Only the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts cast all their votes for McCarthy! The only state in the Union to see through Nixon’s lies.

Serendipitously, I happened to be reading Eric Larson’s, “The Demon of Unrest” in California last week. I’d rather not carry paper books in my luggage, and so I’m left to catch up with certain books on my iPad’s Kindle App. I found myself settling back into Civil War history with Larson’s incredible narrative of the time just before Lincoln’s election to the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. A period of just five months! All the intrigue, all the rebel-rousing, all the back room negotiating and the fear. The unbridled fear that a Southern way of life, based on slavery, was about to be extinguished.

” —a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were ‘so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

It was pro forma for congressmen to carry pistols to the floor, and Larson tells us that if they didn’t carry one, they carried two! President Buchanan, Lincoln’s predecessor, was not just a lame duck, he was the Neville Chamberlain of his time trying to avoid the tornado heading straight for his administration. State after state would secede from the Union, and there reading on a deck in sunny California, I understood the fear, the demonic fear of losing something so fundamental. Like losing the civil rights my ancestors fought for; it’s an existential threat.

In the past few months I’ve been focused on my recovery and not on the fact that Mr T was re-elected. And just as my bones are healing, my psyche is coming to terms with the inevitable inauguration. We are heading into a bleak political horror show, just as a bitter, cold week descends on us here in Nashville.

I’ve started making soup again, all the washing and chopping are good therapy for my hands. These hands must get strong to hold twins! My friend Les brought me cranberry muffins yesterday and while Bob headed over to the Bride’s house to help hang some floating shelves, we got to catch up. Her son went back to college and her husband, a pediatrician, went back to his office. I thanked her for watering my plants while we were away, and leaving us a warm pot of black-eyed peas for New Year’s Eve.

We certainly need all the luck we can muster for the next four years. And ALL the Legos!

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