Luck

The shortest day of the year always reminds me of just how short our memories are, how brief the attention span of the average American, how soon we forget.

There is nothing really wrong in living in the moment — as long as your luck holds out. And Americans have, overall, been lucky, probably luckier than we deserve given the litany of our past transgressions.

“Luck,” E.B. White said, “is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

We like to think of America as a self-made nation, that our “luck,” as Branch Rickey might have put it, is totally the result of our collective hard work, “… the residue of design.”

We like to think of America as a self-made nation, that our “luck,” as Branch Rickey might have put it, is totally the result of our collective hard work, “… the residue of design.”

However derived, our luck is what has set us apart, created that “American exceptionalism” we like to brag about ad nauseam — and which, to foreigners, makes us sound like bores; they rightfully ask, “Exceptional how, exactly?”

We answer by pointing to our democracy as our saving grace, our particular rabbit’s foot that has served us well over the last 250 years, the talisman that has set us apart from the rest of the world and made us exceptional.

Democracy overcame its anxiety on election day, with Democrats able to retain half of their power in Congress. It was close, but it’s the outcome not how close the race that ultimately matters in politics.

And for America it was important that Democrats did continue with control of the Senate as the majority of Republicans have gone off the deep end — they’re certainly incapable of governing, even unfitted of putting together a leadership team to guide their slim majority in the House.

Off and on throughout our history there has been a significant segment of one party or the other that’s been so strident in its views as to make their party as a whole dysfunctional.?

Which is certainly true of the Republican Party today. How could the party of Lincoln have morphed into such a mess?

We tend to forget that nothing we’re seeing today wasn’t also seen by our ancestors, and only once did our luck not hold fast, our exceptionalism fail us, when loud words turned into swords.?