New Year's Eve

I’m not celebrating. I just wrote my friend to tell her I wouldn’t be coming to her party tonight.

Today is the last day of the last year my husband was alive. How can I be glad that it’s ending, this fragile link to his life? How can I celebrate the end of this most horrible, most precious year?

I wrote yesterday about the ‘strange logic of grief.’ This is another example. Ordinarily I think of New Year’s as just an arbitrary day of the calendar; we have to pick one day to start a year with, after all. But this year the meaning is all twisted up with my sadness and loss: as long as it is 2015 Arthur was alive this year. Tomorrow it will be last year.

My last photo of Arthur, taken February 2015

Liberals: Exactly What Are We Celebrating?

Liberals have been excited ever since the November 2012 election; they seem convinced that Republicans are destroying their own party. The evening shows on MSNBC are filled with ridicule of the latest conservative’s statement and celebrations of the imminent demise of the Republican Party.

In my opinion this celebration is misguided.

I believe liberals would be much better off spending their time explaining why the country would do better with liberal policies than conservative ones. It’s so much easier to trash the Republicans—and it has more entertainment value.

But just because the Republicans have lost some elections, and are having trouble finding new voters, doesn’t mean the party is going to disintegrate. As many people have pointed out, the Democratic Party went through a similar experience in the 1970s and that party is still here.

Perhaps the main reason I believe liberals need to focus on communicating their message is because conservatives have been winning the national political debate for decades now. After the 2012 election David Frum wrote that conservatives shouldn’t despair, because “Whatever you think of the Obama record, it's worth keeping in mind that by any measure, free enterprise has been winning the game for a long, long time to this point.”