Perhaps it is depression -- I've wrestled with it for 25 years.
Or maybe it is a new burden, the cost of looking closely at American politics and realizing the Bush administration is a symptom, not the disease.
Those who truly understand the nature of viruses must have felt a similar crushing weight, when the medical community isolated HIV. At that point, virologists knew they were no longer looking for a cure, but only ways to mitigate the systems and delay the inevitable.
Our cultural/political model rests heavily on the idea that each generation must out-do its predecessor, a systemic flaw propagated by the inherent competetion of capitalism. Parents must leave the world a better place for their children; children must rebel more outrageously than their parents; new corporate leadership must generate more profit than those they replaced.
It is a paradigm that cannot succeed, contrary to the most basic laws of the universe. Everything that expands or accelerates unabated eventually destroys itself.
And eventually, so too will the Bush administration. As I have heard time and again from those both older and wiser, the pendulum always swings back the other way.
But a physical pendulum is governed by gravity and friction and conservation of energy, so it will always come to rest at the middle. This is what it means to govern: to control the actions or behavior of.
We, the people, have abdicated self-government to new despots, tyrants increasingly malignant and perspicacious about human nature, armed with strategies designed to educe the evil in us all.
Unless we reclaim the willingness to self-govern, the American pendulum will not wind down, but will be pulled away further and further, spending less time in the center with each pass.
Unless we fundamentally change the paradigm, embrace the burden of self-government, the lesson of the Bush administration will be that they almost succeeded in their political coup.
And the next generation we elect -- republicans or democrats, it matters not -- will seek only to advance this adminstration's successes to acheive the ultimate goal of all those who crave and seek power.