In the last seven years I've been determined, I've been despairing, and I've occasionally been so furious I couldn't see straight. But I don't believe that I have ever felt the way I've felt this week: heartsick. A heavy, bone-deep weariness that makes me want to bury my face in my hands and sit for a thousand years.
Part of it is that after a long time of dancing on the brink of the cliff, we've finally tumbled over. The press may still present the situation as "moving toward a constitutional showdown," but that showdown has already come and gone, with the only question being how (and if), we can wrest our nation back from those who believe we are a nation of men, rather than a nation of laws. Then there's the sense that, having won at the polls, we've been unable to translate that victory into a meaningful change in the nation's direction.
But the real source of that roiling down in my guts is the court decisions we've seen this week.
In a few fevered days of summer, we've watched the Supreme Court twist time's arrow into reverse. Civil rights have been eroded. The Endangered Species Act has been gutted. The effort to keep elections from bending to corporate dollars has been torn apart. A generation of progress gone, blown away with the words that have become a mantra "in a five to four decision..." Worse yet is the sure knowledge that these decisions don't represent the end of these reversals, they're only the beginning.
I am not a lawyer -- and if you don't believe me, you've only to scan the comments (or my email) any time I post about decisions in the court. But I can read, and reading these court decisions is like falling into a looking-glass world where segregation is a benefit and free speech belongs only to those who can afford it.
I know that the only possible solution to these problems is that we work to see a Democrat installed in the White House, if not to regain control of the court, to at least see that things get no worse. And yet it's hard to think today. Hard to be reasonable. The temptation is to reach for either a suitcase or a pitchfork, and I don't know which would be more satisfying.
Tomorrow I'll get up, and I'll start working again, and I'll start needling my friends about Iraq Moratorium Day. Today... I'm going to sit here, and keep my eyes closed for a bit.