I've been doing a bit of re-organizing in my home office--moving the clutter from one spot to the other. A futile attempt at creating coherence, but, still, not an altogether futile effort. For you see, little nuggets of the past are re-discovered. I came across a notebook I'd kept in San Francisco in the Autumn of 1972, a brief interruption from my life in Michigan.
On the day after Richard Nixon was re-elected President of the United States, trouncing Senator George McGovern, I wrote these comments.
"We will not rally behind the polices we deplore!," said McGovern in his concession speech.
I included the famous quote from Thomas Paine, written in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the cause of independence seemed doomed. "These are the times that try men's souls."
McGovern also said that he was proud of "The title of Peacemaker." (The Vietnam War was still going on.) and, speaking of the overwhelming scope of his rejection by American voters, he quoted a line from Abraham Lincoln, "It hurts too much to laugh, and I'm too old to cry."
I ended this page in the notebook with the line "Nixon elected..." and these lyrics from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song..."this much madness is too much sadness...you be on my side, I'll be on your side, together we might get away... she could drag me over the rainbow and send me away."
1972 and I'd just turned 21 years of age. Now it's 2017 and I'm on the other side of 65. Time passes. A lot of water over the dam. Who knows what lies ahead? But, then as now, I will stand for the policies I believe in. And keep the faith that in the back and forth of human affairs "the better angels of our nature" will prevail.
"We move above the moving tree,
In light upon the figured leaf.
And hear upon the sodden floor,
Below, the boarhound and the boar,
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars."
(T.S.Eliot)