Light and Momentary

November 30

This is the last day of the strangest November I have ever seen.

If you had told me on November 1 that I would be writing more posts about politics than anything else this month, I would have said, "Huh, you haven't been reading this blog for very long, have you? I don't write about politics." 

Anyway. Thirty days, thirty posts, eight consecutive Novembers. 

Voting while Catholic

I want to know how "I vote like a Catholic" turned into "I vote against abortion." Because do you know what that equivalency got us, you guys? It got us Donald Trump. It got us a political culture in which if you choose your buzzwords wisely, you can get 60% of white Catholics to vote for you -- even if you admit to being a serial adulterer who thinks it's NBD to grab women's genitals without their consent. This state of affairs does not align with any plausible definition of a culture of life. And yet if you are a Catholic spending time with other Catholics, you doubtless heard that your faith required you to vote for Trump. A vote for Clinton was a mortal sin, they said; a vote for a third-party candidate was a vote for Clinton. QED, they said. Arwen opened up a Facebook discussion in which she invited Trump voters to talk to her about their reasoning, and in it she was told categorically that there was no possible way she could have cast an ethical vote for Clinton.

You guys, we've got to get it less wrong next time around. 

Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

Today our president-elect proposed that protected speech should be grounds for stripping away citizenship. I am aghast: the soon-to-be leader of the free world is suggesting that dissidents should be deprived of citizenship. Let's talk about CCC 1902 ("Authority...must not behave in a despotic manner") and CCC 1903 ("If rulers...enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order,...'authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse'") and CCC 1917 ("It is incumbent on those who exercise authority to strengthen the values that inspire the confidence of the members of the group"). And let's not forget CCC 1915: "One must pay tribute to those nations whose systems permit the largest possible number of citizens to take part in public life in a climate of genuine freedom."

I believe in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each unborn life. That belief compels me to express vehement opposition to the nomination of Tom Price, who would work to diminish access to prenatal care for pregnant women as well as medical care for their already-born babies and children. I believe that I am called to preferential love for the poor as described in CCC 2448-- not just tolerance coupled with admonitions to take some personal responsibility already, but preferential love. And based on the first three weeks of Trump as PEOTUS, I have to say I'm not seeing much in the preferential-love-for-the-poor department.

Tonight after Evening Prayer I asked the kids if they wanted to write postcards with me. Some of today's ire was directed at state officials; some was aimed at Trump. In my little stack of outgoing mail I'm telling them about CCC 1935 and about CCC 2240. I didn't get to CCC 2211 tonight, but it's next on my list. In the 51 days before the intemperate and inexperienced Donald Trump is given command of our drone army and our nuclear weapons, I plan to make a lot of noise. And in all of the noise I make I'll be telling my elected officials to watch out for 2018, when I'll be voting Catholic.

Obligatory

Maybe it's impossible for me to get through NaBloPoMo without one post telling you that there are only x days left in NaBloPoMo. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Advent

The Nativity set is on the server, and the Advent candles are sitting in the wreath with their usual degree of catawamposity, and I have a picture that might suffice for our Christmas cards. (My standards are low. Does the picture contain all five of my children? Is anyone actually scowling? Is anyone extremely blurry? Slightly blurry has been known to pass muster, because getting this whole crew to smile for the camera at the same time wears me right out.)

Before we get much further into the season, I need some advice, please. Here's the story. During our first Christmas as godparents, I started a practice that might need to die. I asked my friend what she thought about an ornament tradition. I had the idea that I would give our goddaughter a special ornament each Christmas until she left home, and then she would have a little collection for her own tree in her first apartment. Her mom thought that was a great idea, and so every year since 1999 I have found an ornament related to my goddaughter's Christmasy name, and have sent it along with a more kid-friendly gift. 

It worked fine for this goddaughter, whose parents have a history of exchanging nice Christmas ornaments or using them to mark special occasions. The problem is that I decided to do it for my nieces and nephews as well, and I don't think think it's a great idea for them. For one kid in particular, the history is a little painful to think about: the mom doesn't even pretend that she sees anything special in these gifts. The more I think about it, the less reasonable it seems to continue giving an annual ornament to this particular kid.

But...tradition, she said lamely. And...family, she said with equal lameness. Do I just...stop? Do I ask my sisters-in-law directly, "Is this idea worth the organizational hassle?" I do understand that there's some hassle involved for them if they're in charge of keeping track. Will there be hard feelings if I continue for some kids and not others? I do not know. But I do not really want to put in the Etsy time, and the PayPal dollars, and the post office time and dollars, if all of my SILs share the opinion of my dismissive SIL about this practice.

I'll keep going for my oldest goddaughter, of course; this is her senior year. But these are my questions for you: how do you figure out the niece/nephew gift question in your family, especially if you have a bunch of nieces/nephews? I usually send each one a book as well as an ornament, but I am not entirely pleased with that strategy. And what's your recommendation for me about the ornament tradition: seek input or make a unilateral decision? I suspect that I have one niece who likes it, one niece who thinks it's okay but wouldn't really miss it, and five nieces/nephews who care not a whit. Alas, it's a bit of a bummer to write that down. Here, I will share a picture of my laughing children to take my mind off things:

Allied

Do you happen to remember the happy post I wrote about Casablanca? Tonight my husband and I went to see Allied, a love story that begins in Casablanca, and I am still shaking my head about it. Warning: spoilers ahead.

It is as if the writer said to himself, "Hm, how many improbable events can I concatenate into a single script without making it clear that I am deliberately being ridiculous? I know: I will have them move a woman who is pushing her baby out of the hospital and into the alley during an air raid. Because there's broken glass on the hospital floor."

"No," he said to himself. "Not ridiculous enough. I'll have my hero repeatedly defy orders and plan a one-man fact-finding mission to Dieppe. I'll have him concoct a clearly preposterous plan and attempt to execute it. And then I"ll have his superior officer say the single most implausible line in a movie chock full of implausibility. How's that? Ridiculous enough?"

Evidently not, because this post is just one slim slice of the deep-dish ridiculous pie that is Allied. I would tell you more, but my 14yo is waiting to use this computer. In sum: rent Casablanca instead. Allied is not worth two hours of your life.

Home again

We're back from our Thanksgiving adventures, and after two trips in consecutive weeks I have some catching up to do: too much email, too much clutter, too much lurking dirt. To bed tonight, to work tomorrow!

Thanksgiving snapshots

Dinner with friends. I am happy to help but not in charge of cleanup. My oldest is making one terrible pun after another about ears. Stella is murmuring to herself sleepily: b...eer? Happy Thanksgiving, friends. 

Snow Globe Brain

This evening I made cranberry sauce to take to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. It is the cranberry sauce I always make for my family, but I almost lost my nerve. "How much maple syrup should I add to the cranberry sauce?" I asked my traditionalist 17-year-old son. "None," he boomed, as I knew he would. Okay, then. Jamie's Unexpectedly Astringent (and Honestly Sorta Penitential) Cranberry Sauce goes on the road. (I love it. I have a serious sour tooth. The kids expect it. Our hosts...may find it startling.)

The pop of the cranberries in their pan sounded like the season. Oh, man, now that I have written that sentence it sounds like terrible catalog copy. I will probably look back on that sentence and wince. But it is a true sentence. I have been so unsettled, my own discombobulation greatly compounded by the mental health issues of someone close to me, and I took a deep breath when I heard that first familiar pop.

Next I made the sweet potatoes, my mind awhirl with the news of Haldeman's Medium article and Jill Stein's accelerating fundraiser. These are crazy times, are they not? The sweet potatoes taste a little like the cook was distracted, but I think the maple syrup will cover a multitude of sins, just like the Bible says. I took another deep breath when I saw the peeler slicing down the first sweet potato, opening up a slash of orange in the deep red skin. Thanksgiving has the prettiest ingredients. (It's easier for me to say that tonight since I don't have the pale and flabby carcass of a 14-pound turkey sitting in my fridge. I can admire the glossy greens and leave the dead-bird-wrangling to my friends.)

Further distracted cooking: cranberry curd, in which I reversed two of the steps and realized I had skipped dinner. I had thought I'd spread the curd on a hazelnut dacquoise layer, but I...don't feel enthusiastic about making a dacquoise layer tonight. Will Jamie make the beet-fennel-apple salad she had planned, or will she trudge off to bed, her hair festooned with cranberry syrup and mashed sweet potato? 

I'm sure the suspense is killing you.

Thankful

• for the chance to spend Thanksgiving with dear friends
• for the final CSA veggie installment, beauteous greens and baby beets and fragrant fennel
• for the final CSA guilt installment, in which I wonder: will I eat all of these beautiful organic vegetables before they deliquesce?
• for leftovers from a delicious and frugal dinner: thinly slice a large onion and brown it in hot fat; add 3 shredded carrots, 3 cloves of slivered garlic, and a small head of thinly sliced cabbage; sprinkle with soy sauce, juice of one lime, powdered ginger (fresh would be better but powdered was good), and toss until cabbage is tender; drizzle toasted sesame oil on top and serve with a pound of browned ground beef over which you have squeezed more lime juice. (We usually try to cook meat separately to accommodate a vegetarian kid.)
• for small steps forward in the office
• for a respite from teaching
• for the rain
• for a laughing boy in another room
• and two sleeping children upstairs
• and of course the two other kids whom I love with equal ferocity
• for recently read diverting books: Crosstalk, Bellwether, Today Will Be Different, This One Is Mine (that last one had some pretty sordid stretches but was ultimately worth it)
• for the anticipation of a Wednesday morning in which no one needs to be hustled out the door. A good day for pumpkin muffins, maybe.
• for an online Al-Anon meeting
• for dental insurance
• for Night Prayer

All I really need to know I learned from Indiana Jones

Richard Spencer is all over news feeds today, now that CNN has quoted him asking whether Jews are people. (Hi, Richard, I am happy to report that your question has a simple answer: YES, they are people. Or, since the Daily Caller got all bent out of shape that CNN didn't quote you precisely, I can answer your original question: "one wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golems." That answer would be: NO. Let me repeat: that's a NO on the soulless golem confusion. Soulless golems do not exist outside children's books, kind of like the Gruffalo. Jewish people, in contrast, do exist outside of children's books, despite the efforts of your ideological forebears to alter that state of affairs. Let me know if you need further assistance distinguishing fantasy from reality.)

Oh my friends, I did not mean for this blog to turn into all politics all the time. I am PINING for the days of GWB over here, those halcyon days when I would get really vexed about a tax plan or the odd unjust war. Remember those days, when every five years I would throw up a post that expressed vague leftward leanings? And we could discuss our legitimate differences of opinion on marginal tax rates and big vs. small government? Remember those days when our president-elect was not haranguing media representatives in closed-door meetings and complaining on Twitter about how the only people who object to his opaque and abundant foreign business dealings are the crooked media?

Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world.Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016

(Hi, DJT, I think what you meant to say there was the crooked Constitution, since that's the actual source of the Emoluments Clause. Perhaps you could give it a stern talking-to as well. Let us know how that works out for you.)

Remember those days before the Russians moved new anti-shipping missiles into the Baltic? Those days from last week?

These are, alas, different days-- days in which a neo-Nazi is thrusting himself into public discourse. What's a person to do but channel Indiana Jones?

So. First item of business: where did I put my bullwhip? All the meek and soft-spoken professors are sporting bullwhips these days. And my Ark of the Covenant is nowhere to be found. Have you seen it?

I saw the first Indiana Jones movie in 1982, which may explain the vagueness of my Ark of the Covenant plan. But I do remember very clearly a message from one of its early scenes: if you hope desperately to be listened to, try writing your text on your eyelids. So here's my message to you, America:

The least of these

Voices on the left have been protesting vociferously against Myron Ebell, Trump's pick to lead the EPA transition team. Here's the thing: Ebell also presents grave concerns from a pro-life perspective. Ebell pooh-poohs the substantial body of work linking environmental toxicants to human health effects -- which include fetal anomalies as well as increased rates of miscarriage and fetal demise. Here's the reality: increased toxin exposure is clearly associated with increased rates of fetal anomalies, and fetal anomalies are a primary driver of late abortions. The EPA is thus in a position to reduce the demand for abortions. Which is a goal deserving of bipartisan support, am I right?

You may already be aware that Ebell heads up the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment. CEI runs a website called Safe Chemical Policy (no link love here), a site in which every single page contains more astonishing assertions. Honeybees aren't dying off in alarming numbers. Banning PBDEs will kill children -- they'll be burned alive, one assumes. Pesticide regulations present a greater threat to public health than pesticides themselves.

The impact of environmental toxicants on gestating babies has been a topic close to my heart since 2002, when I first encountered ecologist Sandra Steingraber's work while 6 months pregnant with Joe. It is impossible to read the history of now-regulated environmental toxins (lead and mercury, in particular) without being enraged by the blindness of industry to the avoidable sufferings of small children and their families. If we care about babies, born or unborn, we cannot have an industry apologist calling the shots at the EPA.

You guys, good science is hard. It is made harder by the myriad competing interests at work. If you google "atrazine miscarriage," one of the first results is a systematic review denying any link between atrazine and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Because I study breastfeeding, I've read enough industry-funded abstracts to spot them at a hundred yards. When I clicked on the "author info" link, I was unsurprised to learn that the paper was funded by a grant from Syngenta -- atrazine's maker. Let me say it again: good science is really hard, and the relationship between environmental toxins and fetal outcomes is multifaceted. We need to figure out how we can best manage Zika, for instance, while balancing the risks of the virus and the risks of insecticides. Someone whose entire approach to science is based on cherry-picking and hand-waving and, above all, industry-protecting -- that person is the wrong man for the job.

I cannot overstate how important it is for us to remember that our decisions about the environment in 2016 can cast a long shadow, affecting babies -- born and unborn -- into the next century. I live in a house built in 1923, the decade in which representatives of the lead industry lied to Congress about the impact of lead paint on children's brains. It's not that eating paint makes children stupid, they said; it's that stupid children eat lead paint. Ninety-three years later, I am still dealing with the fallout: getting preparation and cleanup protocols written into every contract with painters, policing footwear and hand-washing to minimize the impact of the lead-contaminated soil that surrounds my home. While scrubbing surfaces I have often wondered: how much damage could Congress have averted if they had done the right thing in the 1920s? Let's not be so foolish again.

The idea of the EPA director as a pro-life champion is an unusual one, I know, so let me sum up my logic once more: many environmental toxins disrupt embryonic development, and disrupted embryonic development is a significant contributor to late-term abortion rates. The pro-life choice is clear: not Myron Ebell.

Back

Home from Philadelphia.

Too tired to put subjects in sentences.

More soon.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

Oh, you guys, I hate typing with my thumbs. But I was so excited about my trip to the Museum of Art that I typed up a whole post about it...and then the hotel WiFi interrupted to demand that I re-enter my access code. I lost the whole thing. Here is the abridged version: art museums always make me grateful for the human impulse to make and preserve beautiful things. There's something in us that seems to be hungry for beauty across places and times. Which is a gift, is it not?

We'll see if I have the patience to reconstruct the longer version tomorrow.  

Freedom and Ignorance

Today during a lull in the conference I walked over to the Liberty Bell. While I was waiting in the security line I saw.this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: America must destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy America. 

Option A seems preferable, doesn't  it?

Frivolous

I've been away from the news almost entirely today, traveling from Gladlyville to Philadelphia for a conference. I've been so focused on the headlines since the election that it feels a little strange to think of posting about my delicious dinner. (Those of you who are on the right or apolitical are probably like "Please talk about your dinner. Please before I unsubscribe.") So: delicious dinner, fun city and some time to explore between sessions, chance to see pals from other parts of the country. And no laundry until Monday. I'm looking forward to it. 

The bud may have a bitter taste

Remember the night before the election, when I told you I'd been singing an old hymn to a new tune? It's a hymn with a story. It was written by William Cowper, who spent his life struggling to see the goodness of God while burdened by crushing mental illness. 

I went to confession on Saturday afternoon ("Bless me, Father, for I have been A JERK about the election") and my pastor reminded me about the permissive will of God: you can believe in the sovereignty of God and still acknowledge that an awful lot of stuff has hit the fan over the years. In singing about the will of God I have not suddenly decided that this situation is his active will. But I am certain that I could see the goodness of God in Aleppo or in a famine, so I will pull my socks up and aim for a better attitude about 21st-century America. Wary and resolute, but also optimistic. I believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, just like Psalm 37 says. (I might look a little bit possessed if I try to make a wary-resolute-optimistic face, but you'll know I mean well, right?)

First thing this morning I called all of my Congresspeople plus Mitch McConnell to make some noise about Bannon's appointment. It doesn't take very long to leave a voice mail: "My name is Jamie Gladly. I am Senator XYZ's constituent in Gladlyville, and I would like to register my strenuous objections to Steve Bannon's appointment as chief strategist. I would like to urge Senator XYZ to do everything in his power to keep Bannon out of the White House. Thank you for your consideration." Will they listen? No idea. Did it make me feel better? It really did, actually. And my 17yo said, "Thanks, Mom, I appreciate that you're calling them."

Recordings in which I am singing push every one of my perfectionist buttons. But you know, I'm really glad I was brave and posted the hasty one with baby Stella in 2009 (oh my gosh, look at those thighs! and remember a world in which toddlers who didn't sleep were our idea of a big problem!*). When I look back at it now I don't wince the way I did when I posted it. So I am going to be brave again, even though I am worried that these high notes may cause you auditory distress. If I had been perfectionistic this morning about The Right Thing To Say that would make Mitch McConnell leap into action, I wouldn't have done anything at all. So here's to imperfect action, and the hope that these lovely words, recorded in more haste than I might wish, may bring you some solace as well. (If the in-line audio player doesn't cooperate, you should be able to right-click and listen in a new tab.) 

*seriously: I got a rejection notice today from a journal that had given me promising preliminary feedback, and I was just like, "Yeah, well, bigger fish to fry." Instant perspective! How's that for a teeny silver lining?

God Moves

God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines of never-failing skill
he treasures up his bright designs and works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take: the clouds ye so much dread
are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.

His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour.
The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.

There are two other verses at this link if you're curious. Huh, I might need a new blog category. I refuse to call it the President Trump category, though. What should it be?

Bits and pieces

At some point in the near future I am going to have to rein in my post-election media consumption. It is eating my peace. But today was not that day, and so I have links to share:

Leon Wieseltier on unity and the lack thereof

Too bad more Catholics didn't listen to Melinda Selmys in September

Did the Bannon announcement make you wish for a word that means "government by the crappiest"? Here you go

Bearing has been on a tear this week 

 

Too close to home

My Twitter feed has been piled high with stories of aggression against women, minorities, and the LGBT community. I've been reading them and shaking my head, but it just hit close to home. I was telling my husband, who cannot bring himself to read the newspaper*, about the men on Villanova's campus who ran at a black woman and knocked her down while chanting "Trump! Trump! Trump!"**

*my husband who always, always reads the newspaper

**hey, you guys obtaining the expensive Catholic education, you seem to have forgotten. The gang shouting the political leader's name in an attempt to intimidate a brown person -- they're on the wrong side in our particular story.

"You saw what happened to the guys across the street, right?" he asked me. "No," I said, "I haven't looked at Facebook since Tuesday night."

The gay couple across the street posted in our neighborhood Facebook group to ask if anybody else had had strange visitors. Two nights in a row, someone rang their bell after dark -- wearing a mask, carrying a baseball bat. Does it surprise you that the only gay couple on the block received the only visit from the masked bat-wielding guy? No harm done (yet?), so I am assuming this is a cowardly attempt to intimidate. 

But it is a cowardly attempt to intimidate on my block. They live across the street. How many times in my Sane Mom Revolution posts have I bragged about my lovely quiet tree-lined safe friendly block?

Safe and friendly if you're straight, I guess.

I went straight to the kitchen and made a batch of pumpkin bars* for them, and I wrote them a note that says "You are welcome on this block." I am still shaking. Stella is still curious about why I am shaking.

*a poor defense against a baseball bat, I know

What do I tell my daughter? I am not prepared for this.

Poverty and Privilege

In 1997 we were a family of 3. Together my husband and I earned something like $13,500 for the year, $200 above the figure in the HHS poverty guidelines for 1997. Elwood brought home $1188 per month, 11 months out of the year, as a doctoral student. I really really really wanted to be with my new baby full time, and I mostly was. I worked a few hours here and there, about which more below.

It was not easy to live on $1200 a month, even in 1997. When I told you about baby Alex's garage-sale clothes earlier this month, I did not mention that virtually all of his clothes were garage-sale clothes. He was well into toddlerhood before I went to Target and bought him a shirt that had actual tags on it.

We ate pots and pots of lentils that year, because lentils cost 44 cents a pound on sale. At Christmas I gave the same gift to my two vegetarian sisters-in-law: two bags each of lentils (red and green, natch, because nothing says festive like a bag of cheap dried legumes) accompanied by a homemade recipe book filled with all my newly discovered lentil dishes. That year I needed to figure out Christmas gifts that cost <$3 apiece.

The experience of living near the poverty line shaped me in ways I did not anticipate. It refashioned the way I thought about healthcare and it challenged prejudices I hadn't even known were there. But only recently have I thought about the ways in which privilege buffered us during the years that we were living on a shoestring.

One key to staying solvent was that we lived in a small rental house in a crummy neighborhood. The day I watched a drug deal go down in our driveway I trembled and wondered if we were doing the right thing. I did not know -- I mean, I had NO idea -- how much my race influenced the interactions I had with the police in that mostly black part of town.

Another key to staying afloat was that we drove a butterscotch yellow 1978 Dodge Aspen, handed down from my grandmother-in-law. (In case you weren't driving in 1997, a 19-year-old car was, like, a centenarian car in those days. Doddering, palsied, slightly eccentric.) I remember feeling a little embarrassed about that car, and trying to overcome the embarrassment because I knew better. I don't remember much awareness of how lucky we were to have someone give us a well-maintained car. When its head gasket blew in December of 1997, my parents were able to lend us the car my brother wasn't using at college, and another doc student let us store the Aspen at his house until he could teach Elwood how to tackle the lengthy and complicated repair. More privilege (parents with a spare car), more connections (a grad student friend with tools, space, expertise).

I took Alex to public health for most of his well-child exams, because when I left my job our health insurance went from a BMW plan to a Yugo plan, and then eventually to a rusted-out moped plan. I remember so vividly the incompetence and contempt of the nurse practitioner who examined him there. I remember my astonishment that she did not understand the anatomy of a middle ear infection (in! a! pediatric! clinic!) and my anger at her immediate escalation to unwarranted scare tactics when I asked about treatment options. I still wonder whether she treated all of her patients so scornfully, or if she wasn't used to pushback on her (wrongheaded) recommendations. I do not remember whether I understood the privilege that allowed me to seek follow-up care at the outpatient clinic where I had worked before Alex was born, and to have my ruffled feathers smoothed by a thoughtful doctor who knew me as a fellow healthcare professional.

I did not see how lucky I was when my MA advisor called me up out of the blue to ask if I would work part-time at home for him: flexible hours, $20 an hour. I did not fully appreciate the gift of an allied health credential-- my ticket to flexible part-time well-paid work. I was poor that year, yes, but I was poor by choice. I knew it was a temporary kind of poor.

I remember that I really did not want to ask family for help, but I don't remember seeing how much help they were already giving us: the showers that welcomed the first grandbaby on both sides, the plane tickets from my frequent-flyer mom that allowed Alex and me to visit her without making the trek in our senescent Aspen, the checks they picked up and the gifts they gave us when we were together.

I've been thinking about all this because in the wake of the election I've been thinking so much about the experiences of Americans living near the poverty line. I remember feeling proud that we survived those days without racking up any debt, but I did not see how unrepresentative our experience was. It wasn't until I lived in Scotland that I appreciated how different foreign residency is from tourism. It took me years to realize that I had only been a poverty tourist. It's not my place to tell the residents how to live.

These days it takes us a lot less than a year to earn $13,500. If my 1997 self could see our current monthly savings:income ratio, she would wonder where we had gone off the rails. (Dear 1997 Jamie, don't worry; you haven't started gold-plating the non-existent elevators in your home. It's just that you have two kids in Catholic high school and one in college. And you're feeding teenagers, who will only eat so many lentils before they mutiny.) I don't ever want to forget the worry that plagued me during that year when we had so little margin. And as we lurch closer to plutocracy in this country, I hope that all of us in the middle class can remember: we don't even know what we don't know about life with no margin.

Sore Losers

Those of us who opposed Trump's candidacy are hearing that we should move on already. And hey, I've moved on plenty of times before now. I've backed more losers than winners in the eight presidential elections I've had the privilege of voting in, and I've always acknowledged the will of the people and the value of a free and fair election. (I did lament on GWB's second inauguration day, but it was a polite lament.)

This is different.

I do not apologize for holding the leader of the free world to a high standard. I do not apologize for recognizing the plain truth that Donald J. Trump fails to meet that standard. I do not apologize for expecting the president of the United States to be a person who is, at a minimum, reasonably truthful and reasonably capable of putting a coherent sentence together.

I will not back down from my assertion that someone who has not managed to learn by age 70 that adults don't talk about genitals in the public sphere -- either the size of their own or the grab-ability of someone else's -- is unfit for polite society, let alone the highest office in the land. I will never rest easy about the judgment of a man whose only metric for evaluating women is how hot they are. (I can hardly wait to hear what Angela Merkel will say when Trump comments on her derriere.)

For those of us who said #neverTrump there is a bit of a balancing act here: we must deplore violence (I do) and support the peaceful transfer of power (I do) while also steadfastly refusing to normalize this gravely abnormal election (I'm going to do that too). I have an obligation to show respect for civil authority. But I have no obligation -- quite the reverse, I would argue -- to pretend I don't notice when someone seems untethered from reality.

It is not normal human behavior to assert repeatedly that you never said something that you actually said on video. If I talked to the family of someone who did so while also demonstrating paranoid and vengeful behavior, I would recommend that they take him immediately to a neuropsychologist for a thorough evaluation. Instead he is taking his family to the White House. This concerns me.

We cannot explain this away. We can certainly hope that his presidency is not marked by the volatility and the -- I can't think of another word here -- the lunacy that made his candidacy so singular. There has been a movement throughout his campaign to explain away his errors in judgment. I will not link to the Catholics4Trump page that asserts he wasn't really mocking a disabled reporter (he was just gesturing, they assure us), but it crossed and re-crossed my Facebook feed. I decline to accept their justification for his clearly aberrant behavior. And let me be very clear: I do not apologize for doing so. 

I am not the sort of sore loser who is going to set anything on fire or even swear at anybody. But in a narrow sense I am a sore loser: I have been heartsore since Hillary Clinton lost this election.

I do not apologize for that either.

This whole "sore losers" thing was most prominent in the Twitter feed of someone with whom I've had friendly email exchanges in the past, someone who expressed skepticism about the upwelling of violence against marginalized groups in the wake of Trump's election. (Do you follow Miriel on Twitter, by the way? She has been on fire about this election and its impact.) I didn't go to the rally on campus Wednesday because I am a bad sport. I went because I wanted to hear what minority students in my community were saying about their lives-- to say "I support you" with my presence.

This is not about partisanship. I would have had concerns about a President Cruz or a President Rubio, but I would not have quailed at the prospect of giving them the nuclear codes. I still believe in the will of the people and the value of a free and fair election. I have a duty to support the peaceful transfer of power. But I also have a duty as a citizen of this country to respond with vigilance to anything that threatens its well-being. And one of those threats, I fear, is about to occupy the Oval Office.