Earlier in my life,  I lived day-to-day with little awareness of, scarce concern about the occupant of the White House.  Lately, I really miss President Obama.  He exhibited probity and propriety for eight years, in the teeth of stiff opposition.  He observed that the cost of health care for a majority of Americans was rising at a double digit rate annually.  He chose to take personal responsibility to address the institutional causes of a deeply rooted, long standing problem.  The Affordable Health Care Act was the result.  To my mind, it was the best possible solution under the circumstances.

President Obama as an act of compassion for the children of undocumented adults, got DACA legislation passed.   The Deferred Action for Childhood Dreamers, allows a renewable two years of deferred action on deportation and a work permit.  Bravo, Mr President.  That cannot be taken from you.

Why did I never feel suspicion, a sense of unease, or betrayal on account of the Obama presidency?  The answer seems clear to me.  My parents did not raise me to be a racist.  I saw Barack Obama as a well educated, well spoken, highly intelligent American.  In my eighteen years of growing up as a North Carolinian, snide, disparaging, off hand remarks were never heard about people of color in our home.

Mr. President I felt fortunate to have you in the White House.  May you and your family fare forward and fare well.

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ADVENTAVIT ASINUS

PULCHER ET FORTISSIMUS

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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III

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think ‘the past is finished’
Or ‘the future is before us’.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death”—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

–The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot verse 3