Presidents’ Day 2026

When things are gone, only then may we glimpse how the seeds of their demise were long ago planted. Perhaps these seeds were planted in the soils of our own presumption that things should remain the same?

How many familiar emblems of the DC scene have been affected during the “Great Takeover,” including the East Wing, the Kennedy Center, the Washington Post or even my beloved municipal public golf course, Rock Creek. These insults pale in comparison to lost lives, lost jobs or deportation. But they hit home and therefore they matter.

It’s stressful to learn in real time how vulnerable things are. This particular time in history seems particularly so and accelerating.  As Shakespeare put it four hundred years ago in Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.” 

Psychologically speaking, loss is real and this is also a matter of perception and perspective. In the face of loss or change, our surety is always surprised. It’s an insult to discover that the world we know, love and care for has been taken away. It is often only then we feel our deepest sense of outrage, our deepest sense of loss. 

We’re guaranteed to be surprised by change, some of us more than others. How we respond will either throw us back upon ourselves and move us forward, or we may project our perceived sufferings outwards onto the world where we find easy scapegoats for our rage. There we may even find tricksters in the guise of saviors only too happy to take on our lives.

We might might smack our forehead in the realization that once again we’ve been fools to assume our version of reality is reality itself. In time, however, we pick ourselves up and go forward armed with a bit more humility and compassion for our fellow man— or we may split the world into opposites and choose one side and blame the other for our pain.

Though the American experiment has rarely lived out the promise of its vision, what keeps it alive is a sense of what it means to be an American. Some say the rest of the world grieves our present turmoil more than we do. For the world– despite whatever reasonable criticisms there are regarding American excess or duplicity– America represents something unique in history: a melting pot, a nation built by the people and for the people. In this sense, America had always been an idea, a symbol more than a reality. Such symbols  have always been a source of hope. 

Somehow we must learn to hold on to the promise of our guiding symbols while remaining open to the shifting archetypal energy beneath them. We must manage the disappointing realities that will always stand in the way of the complete realization of our hopes and dreams. 

Things change but our fantasies remain. Without fantasy we cannot hope, we cannot nourish a loving vision for our lives and for our world. But this fantasy must be grounded in a kind of realism– a tragic awareness that Hamlet could not achieve and so he plunged into rage and madness. Our fantasies must not become so literalized they become projected onto ideas or persons we hold responsible for their realization.

Without hope we fall prey to cynicism, selfishness, survivalism, transactionalism or even cruelty. Without realism to ground us, however, we may fly around in the clouds, fall prey to powerful archetypes in the guise of zealots or we may avoid life on its own terms. We must constantly adjust to the natural flux of change. This is the nature of nature. We must be guided by our dreams and keep our own feet on the ground,  remaining responsible for our own lives.

I believe the American experiment has more room to grow. I could be wrong but that is my hope. In order for the experiment to survive, it will be important for each of us to stay open to the vital energies of our cherished fantasies while remaining grounded to what life teaches us again and again: our version of reality, what is right and true, is never complete. We always live in a half-blind state of limited understanding and flawed perception, but we are responsible for our lives nonetheless. 

Ultimately, we should feel greater compassion for ourselves and for each other in the recognition that each of us is living out a fragile dream of certainty mixed with uncertainty, living in a time which is "out of joint” and yet,--- if we remain conscious, open and alert– always returning to itself.