At some point in the last four years I looked at a big bowl of root vegetable slaw and I said, "I am going to eat slaw until I feel better." We make a lot of slaw at our house, with carrots and kohlrabi and radishes and these delicious ivory-colored Japanese turnips, and I couldn't even count the number of times I sat down at the dinner table and said, "I am going to eat slaw until I feel better." Sometimes it did make me feel better to eat nourishing food with my family, but it turns out that the healing powers of slaw are fairly limited in an era characterized by more than 25,000 lies from the mouth of the president. And let's not forget the >50,000 words' worth of Twitter insults. That's, like, a novella's worth of Twitter insults.
The Slaw of Happiness turned into a gentle family joke. "Here, Mom, have some slaw," the kids might say if I seemed down. But last night I sat down to dinner with my family, knowing that the person in the White House had started his day at Mass and had promised on a mammoth Douay-Rheims Bible to dedicate his whole soul to the work of governing this fractured nation justly. I took a deep breath and let it all the way out, immeasurably relieved that the day had passed without further violence in Washington. "You know," I said, "I don't believe I'll be eating any more slaw."
(Yes, the Mexico City policy; yes, Little Sisters of the Poor. Today, right now, I am just immensely grateful that Trump is gone.)
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