Hi, friends,

I am so livid right now about Chuck Schumer literally colluding with nazis by voting for cloture that I'm shaking, but what I really want to talk about is how lucky I have been in my life.

I know a lot of us have trouble with awful people we went to high school with, and there are a few I never want to see again, but I have a surprising number of friends from high school that I still talk to frequently and make an effort to see when I'm near them. It feels so fulfilling to me to have these friends who have known me for almost 40 years, and we seem to just like each other more as time wears on. There's something about having known someone when you were both true dorks, got cool, and are now coming back around the other side to being dorks again in middle age.

One of those high school friends, Matt, came to Boston this week with his wife for her work conference, and asked me to come into the city to hang out. I came in and we had breakfast, and then headed to the JFK Library. Matt and I would absolutely have told you that we're political opposites until a decade ago, and we spent plenty of time debating tax structures, public funds, military spendng, and all the sorts of things people debate about politics when you have a relatively functional political system. But now that the two sides have become "wants everyone to die so we can become rich" and "love your neighbor," Matt and I don't have the luxury of debating small points of policy anymore. We're just trying to figure out how to help all of us survive together.

We spent some time at breakfast marvelling that both of us think we're not really Democrats, we just have to vote with them, because he's too centrist and I'm too leftist, but we seem to agree on most things now. It makes me wonder if the traditional scales of political parties in the US have not only shifted waaaay to the right, but are simply not useful for describing cohesive political views anymore, and that's why we keep losing, because we're constantly playing defense but we don't really know who's on our own team.

I've never been especially interested in JFK, and would never have gone to the library had Matt not invited me to go along, but the visit was genuinely life-changing for me. JFK really thought that what the US needed was someone with a steady hand to push through difficult times for the betterment of everyone in the US, and that he could be that steady hand. There was a short movie on the Bay of Pigs crisis that showed exactly how terrifying, confusing, and high-stakes that situation was, but how both sides seemed to understand that the other had reasons to be suspicious, reasons for their fears, and needed an assurance of safety and that they wouldn't destroy each other over something minor.

In an interview after that crisis was resolved, JFK said that his guidelines when he was leading through these situations were to act with firmness, get all the available information on the situation, and then act with care. Firmness, gather information, and care. We were so lucky as a nation to have someone who not only had thought about his rubric for leading but had chosen concepts that are essential, thoughtful, and robust. The degenerates in office currently don't seem to have even a passing acquaintance with any of those three concepts.

I think, as a person who tends to be lucky more often than normal, and has good luck with bad luck constantly, that we are going to come out of this current situation in better shape (eventually, not immediately) than we were before. For one thing, people of good will are all on the same team now, even if we don't know what to label that team. And for another, our boundaries are expanded. If these moral black holes can shut down vital agencies, then we can push through single-payer health care without having to compromise to make misanthropes happy.

I don't know how long this is going to take, and we're going to have to cut a lot of dead wood out (like Schumer), but we can rebuild as the country we always wanted to be and wished we were before.
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Don't forget that next Monday is St. Gertrude's Day, and she's the patron saint of cats and gardens.

Love,

Magda

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