* * I'm taking a sabbatical

It’s the day after Election Day, and I’ve decided to take a sabbatical. A long one. Six months. I’ll re-engage with the political world in May.

I’ve always followed elections closely, increasingly in recent years. Like sporting events, sometimes the score goes my way and sometimes not. Roll with it. But I can’t say I’ve ever been more discouraged than by the results from yesterday’s elections and what I feel my country has done to itself.

Prior to yesterday, Barack Obama was President and our Congress was split between control of the House of Representatives in Republican hands and the Senate in the hands of the Democrats. Yesterday, Obama is still President but Republicans took control of both. This was, in the parlance, a shellacking.

So…

What is the nature of these new Republicans and what can we imagine these people will do with their new-found power? Across the nation, the most extreme, vitriolic, obstructionary, science-ignoring, climate change-denying people were elected.

Kansas re-elected Governor Brownback, who from what I can gather did irreparable harm to that state, destroying their budget to the point where needed services no longer happen.

In Iowa, voters elected tea party and big oil candidate Joni Ernst to the Senate. She appears to be a climate change skeptic and conspiracy theorist who believes state government can nullify federal laws. She will begin on Day 1 to impeach the President.

In Florida, extremist Governor Rick Scott was re-elected. Scott has said repeatedly that he doesn’t believe in climate change, while his state is one of the nation’s most vulnerable to rising seas.  

Here in Virginia, once-popular Democratic Governor and now Senator Mark Warner, a centrist who has habitually reached across the aisle to gain Republican support for bills he’s introduced, barely, and I mean barely got a win over a political unknown named Ed Gillespie. His main resume achievement was a lobbyist for Enron. Enron, for gosh sakes!

The loons have surely landed.

Will these new Republicans in Congress work to solve out nation’s most vexing problems?

Will they provide solutions to our burgeoning student debt load and make college more affordable?

Will they provide solutions to provide health care to the uninsured and make health care more affordable?

Will they provide solutions to reign in Wall Street’s excesses and malevolence?

Will they provide solutions to our immigration problem?

Will they provide solutions to climate change?

Will they provide solutions to the destruction of Appalachia by mountaintop removal mining?

Will they provide protections to women, homosexuals, and minorities?

Will they provide solutions to our burgeoning wealth and income disparity?

Will they provide solutions to our broken election system?

The answers are, respectively: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. What will they do? They’ll set back the clock 50 years on social progress, lay the groundwork for another economic crash, and accelerate the destruction of the environment. They’ll sue the President, obstruct the President, impeach the President, and generally do whatever they can to prevent him from doing his job.

So why did the Democrats lose so badly? Why was a popular guy like Mark Warner not a run-away winner? It is said to be his association with “our unpopular President.”

I’m flabbergasted by this.

Barack Obama was elected twice by decent margins. He has presided over a resurgent economy with declining unemployment, rising stock market values and a reducing deficit. He has disengaged us from two wars against enemies that didn’t threaten us and added millions to the ranks of the insured. It seems impossible for anybody to assert that our nation is worse off now after six years of his leadership than when he began (something that surely cannot be said about his predecessor). And we hate him for it!

As much as I’ve avoided the race issue, I can’t see how there is any other explanation. If a president named Joe Smith instead of Barack Obama had these achievements, we’d be shouting his praises. Yet millions of Americans loathe Obama with a righteous, fervent passion.

The destructive direction we seem to have taken will wreak enormous, lasting harm for decades. And liberals and progressives are powerless to stop it.

On a personal level, I’ve decided I need a break. I have been putting a huge amount of time, effort, and emotional and intellectual energy into politics and it’s been wasted. I am putting the finishing touches on my fourth book, a novel about Virginia politics, which I will release the first of the year. I spent much of last year running for statewide office. I have given speeches, participated in debates, and written countless position papers, letters to the editors, and commentaries about politics. And I can see that they have done nothing to sway my fellow citizens. We seem hell-bent on self-destruction, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

As much as I enjoy politics, I have come to realize that it has become an emotional burden for me. I became mindful of this lyric from the movie Jesus Christ Superstar:

Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you, oh.
Don't you know
Everything's alright, yes, everything's fine.
And we want you to sleep well tonight.
Let the world turn without you tonight.
If we try, we'll get by, so forget all about us tonight

I think for my sake and the sake of others, the world should turn without me for awhile. So I plan to refrain from engagement with politics for the next six months. I’ll not post nor comment on posts on social media. I’ll not write editorials. I’ll refrain from talking politics with friends. I’ll try to avoid reading about it. I’ll let the world go on. It doesn’t need me.

This morning, when I went to the box to get the morning paper, there was a flower, an iris, trying to bloom. Amidst a backdrop of brown, earth tone fallen leaves, was a bright yellow burst. I am having trouble articulating the symbolism of its futile effort, but I’m sure it’s there. It’s a topsy turvy world and I cannot fix it.