WHAT NOW?

IS THIS UNPRECEDENTED?

If you’re even near my age (85), you’ve lived through uncounted unexpected moments. It’s tempting to try to list them, if only to demonstrate that we’ve been here before.

Korean “police action,” so-called because Eisenhower didn’t want (dare?) to ask Congress to declare war.

Kennedy’s assassination, so eerily seeming an echo of Lincoln’s.

The Vietnam War, which ignited the first mass protest of our generation. Protest fueled by the draft of all males when they turned 18. Unless, of course, they (we) were among the privileged, who could get deferred for education, or medical infirmity. (bone spurs).

Nixon, the only President to be driven from office. Consider that leaders of his own party came to tell him they would no longer support him. His chief of security, a retired general, had instructed the Chief of Staff not to obey any orders from Nixon to start a conflict, without consulting him first. Because Nixon seemed sometimes to have lost touch with reality, and might have tried to start a war to divert attention from his failing support.

There was 911, followed by self-defeating attempts to use American military superiority in Afghanistan, and Iraq, to quell that troublesome middle-east.

Well, I succumbed to that temptation, wishing to show that we’ve been here before. And somehow emerged each time, at least seemingly intact.

It feels different now.

Not because we’ve never had a madman at the helm, but because all those earlier times have weakened our institutions, and our national resolve, and opened the way for the horror we’re living through.

People like me assumed our system had sufficient safeguards to keep an unhinged president from exercising his whims with the power to which he has access.

What we failed to recognize was that my generation, coming of age between the end of WWII and 1973, had enjoyed the perks the system provided. Not because of our particular efforts, but because WWII left our nation with strength unmatched by other nations that were devastated by the war.

So, while the generations who came after us, weas having a harder and harder time gaining access to the affluence that we enjoyed, we didn’t acknowledge or recognize that.

Until a man came along who saw all that, and was clever and charismatic enough to use it for his personal advantage.

Now what?

I won’t live to see what finally emerges, now that the world, and even, I hope, a majority of our own, can see how the weaknesses in our institutions can be exploited.

I will continue to walk for peace

because it’s what an old man and his dog can do.

And I believe it matters. Will have consequences I can’t envision.

I mean to put this moment into some perspective, so that you might trust in something that will emerge from calling to the best in all of us, to prevail over the self-destructive part of us.

I will keep walking, writing, praying… because

I believe in you. I trust you. I love you.