Day by day November 5th recedes. Today is the 12th. Psychologically it seems as if an entire age has transpired. I mean that we ‘liberal minded’ are worn out by news of sycophants appointed to head cabinet departments, for which they need only demonstrate unconditioned, servile loyalty to the President. The next four years seem a very long journey forward. Domestic social conditions, the state of the world four years henceforward, quite impossible to imagine.

What is called for, what is demanded by our condition? Is self-pity permissible? And what about seeking to understand empathically how so many of us felt simpatico to cast a ballot in favor for this dark, violent individual? On the other hand there is the option of stoic acceptance of “the will of the people” as if that were a sacred, divine principle? Well is it? Is it higher or lower, morally speaking? Do I imagine that common ground exists between myself and any individual affirming mass deportation of thousands of immigrants? Or those whose principles include denial of medical care to women at risk in the course of a pregnancy?

What does morality amount to, to insist upon a “peaceful transfer of power?” Forgive me if I am suddenly nauseated. Peace departed a long time ago. Americans have sustained a condition of thinly veiled conflict for a long time, some would say at least as far back as the War Between the States.  And now?

Be on your guard…

For there are no absolute morals.

HIGHER IN NAME ONLY.

—You say
that the morality of pity
is a higher morality than that of stoicism?

Prove it!

But take care
not to measure the “higher” and “lower”
degrees of morality
once more by moral yardsticks;

for there are no absolute morals.

So take your yardstick
from somewhere else*, and be on your guard!

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 139

* There is nowhere else for us, except here and now on this planet. Is a yard stick at all necessary? None of the alleged supernatural moral yardsticks have helped. I think those yardsticks themselves have made exploitation and murder worse. Perhaps we’ve a bellyful of so-called absolute moral certainty. Its time for us, all of us, to do our own heavy lifting…  Is measurement essential to knowing whether we are making progress?