Monday open thread: Peace
This is one of the great things that a Biden presidency promises us: Peace.
We won't wake up every morning dreading what a President Biden will tweet out. We won't cringe through the day awaiting some deranged outpouring.
We'll go through our days attending to our business. We'll have lunch with friends. We'll fall in and out of love. We'll trash talk about sports. We'll talk about art and literature. And the wheels of government will roll on without us wondering if those wheels will go off the rails.
We will be able to get on with our lives, and the workings of Washington will be a dim presence in our lives. We'll trust that Joe Biden will be dilligently attending to the business of governance. But he won't be in our faces every day. He won't be puffing hinmself up with his accomplishments. He won't be picking Twitter fights with opponents. He won't be holding two or three rallies a week to assuage his ego.
Donald Trump screeched that this will be boring. Good. I want boring. I want to be able to take care of me and mine, and not worry that some tweet will take my 457 down by $1000. I want to focus on my job, and my wife, and my family, and my friends. I want to be able to proceed in my day without dreading the evening news.
When peace obtains, you take it for granted. When it's gone, you rue that you were so cavalier about it. Peace is a blessed state. And I speak not only about absence of war or conflict. I speak about the peace which passeth understanding. About knowing in your core that you don't have to worry. Knowing that you can attend to the particulars in your life, and that the greater world will swirl in its gyres.
The thing which Trump stole from us was equanimity. Because he has none. He is a sad, forlorn figure, never at peace with himself. And because he's not at peace with himself, he strives to deny it to anyone else. If his inner life is absent, he has no idea that the majority of the world wants an inner life which isn't smashed by his words and actions. He is the center of his universe, and wants to impose that center on everyone else.
We had become so used to peace that we had forgotten how fragile it was. It can be upended by any sociopath who wants to impose his or her will on the people. Trump was the first true sociopath we've had in the White House. And now that his time is at an end, I hope that we come to a greater appreciation for what peace is, and how precious it is. "What do you have to lose?" Our equanimity. Our balance. Our ability to live our lives without fear.
As we settle into a new normal whose parameters we do not yet know, I hope that we can recapture that inner peace. That space within ourselves where we reside without being buffeted by the outside world. That rock of stability which allows us to soldier on. Of his many crimes, Trump robbing us of that is one of the greatest. He robbed us of some of our humanity. Now we have to reclaim it.