Democratic Ennui

Although Wally is getting over a cold that knocked him on his ass for several days, he still feels listless.  “It’s like walking through syrup,” he recently told friends over lunch.  But he was not alone.  Others expressed similar feelings of vague dissatisfaction.  No one present, however, could define the vagueness nor cause for the subtle weariness that had overtaken them for the past year or so.

And it wasn’t until Barb, a retired social worker who’d been fingering her iPhone for the past several minutes, loudly exclaimed, “We got ennui, that’s what we got.”

Consisting mostly of retired progressive Democrats, it was only naturel that they figured the root of their malaise lay in their disappointment and neglect by the very people whom they had voted for and counted on to lead the way out of the doom and darkness of the Bush/Cheney Years.

But the path out of political doom and darkness was becoming circular, “and we seem to be heading back in the same direction from which we came,” Wally asserted. 

“Wally, you really need to get a life,” a retired air force sergeant argued.  “It ain’t all about rollbacks of financial and environmental reforms.  You gotta realize that this too shall pass.”

In the end, however, Wally had to admit that the sergeant was right.  But right now, America is in search of its soul.  And for Wally, that means only one thing.   Now that the Christmas commercials are over, the political ones are already on their way and will be here soon.  And things will surely get ugly.

“Sometimes,” he posted to a friend, later that day, “this constant and never changing impermanence really sucks.  You never really know what’s coming next.”

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