Fall in the Republic

Notes from Post-Election November

I rode my bicycle today.  It was one of those early days of November where you could still feel the sun’s heat upon your skin despite having begun to lean away from our star for the months ahead.  A slight autumn wind was blowing as a gentle reminder of the winter still to come.  I pedaled my steel frame Ritchey into what we used to call the countryside just out of town.  Turn of the century sprawl has ensured that the countryside is ever-receding - so that I rode outside of city limits but not outside of city influence.  

It’s a few days after the 2020 election, and the outcome is soon to be under litigation.  At the moment, barring revelatory evidence, quasi Republican Donald Trump will be the first one term president since George H.W. Bush, and Democrat Joe Biden will assume the executive office in January of the new year.  Trump campaign signs populate the roads I like to ride vastly outnumbering any other candidate’s representation.  I wonder how long until they uproot their signs from the ground; how long is long enough to evince that their fervor wasn’t predicated on backing a winner?  Like the browned blooms of the hydrangea in front of my house I suspect the signs will slowly loosen their hold and be blown away by the wind just as my wife’s favorite blossoms do every year escaping winter’s frosts, and making way for new buds in the spring.

It’s with this circular description that I observed this year’s election, and I’m afraid how I will observe the elections in the foreseeable future as well.  I pedaled my bicycle up a slight grade where the road was bookended by looming yellow poplar trees.  The wind blew casting a barrage of the poplars’ amber foliage across road.  I sat up on my saddle and tried to catch a falling leaf as I passed by.  Such luck wasn’t on my side this afternoon, however. I wasn’t in the right place at the right time to stop any one of these leaves from touching the asphalt and the further I stretched the more vulnerable I left myself to the threat of a gust of wind with a sadist’s sense of humor.  I was only interested in this game because it seemed like fun, possible.  I knew that catching a leaf would make me no more of a participant in their yearly abscission than my contribution in the last federal election - where both acts performed by the individual are rendered moot by an inevitable force of nature. The bit part I play in the time allotted does not impact the dead of winter, or deter the political machinery grinding out another result.  I’ve reluctantly taken my seat in the audience, along with a number of my candidate-less compatriots playing the twelfth-man, to observe federal affairs in which I have a vested interest; affairs so contrived that in order to participate I find myself riding a bicycle no handed uphill in the wind trying to catch a spiraling leaf before it can touch the ground.

Come late spring when the branches have replenished their greenery no one is surprised, in fact most constituents seem to be relieved when the new leaves are no different than their predecessors; the layman will not be able or bothered to discern the difference between the former and the latter.  Three of the last four presidents were born within months of each other in the same year of 1946.  A similar generational trend can be found in the years post-Kennedy and pre-H.W.  Both our elections and the changing of seasons are reliably consistent; occurring regardless of those in observance.  Where the processes fall away from each other however, is that one has a byproduct of mutual interest sustaining life and promising renewal, whereas its counterpart is wholly self-interested.  But even though I cannot expect to impede these mechanisms entirely maybe there is some solace to be found. For as long as the cycle continues there is the promise of mutation; that one November day I’ll feel the leaf between my fingers, pressed to my palm, and it will be unfamiliar