The results of the presidential election were deeply satisfying. But it was a grievous disappointment that so many people, despite the last four years of rolling catastrophes, still voted to roll on.
Moreover, the Senate. It’s hard to swallow how my fellow voters reason when they put into office — or back into office — people who seem to have no purchase in the fundamental principles of our country and government, beyond phony doctrines and campaign distortions, lies and smears. I mean, Mainers, what were you thinking?
So my hopes for the Georgia senatorial election are moderate.
As I worked out the mixture of feelings and thoughts I had, I recalled a passage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which Lizzie Bennet works out how she feels after a series of happenings that, like our election, did not result in perfect happiness. It’s exactly how I feel.
Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.