Charlie Pierce: "I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family."

My thoughts are at the end ... down there ↓ but first, thoughts from one of my favorite scribes.

Even in Great Despair, There Is Hope, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family.

It will do us all good, I think, to take a weekend off from the cares of a world that seems to be coming apart from its mind outwards. It will do us all good, I think, to take this particular holiday slowly as it comes around. Even the pagans needed some excuse to rejoice in the darkest time of the year, which is why Christians copped the notion in the first place, and this has been a year with more than its share of dark times, god knows. And there's no telling what's coming down out of the deep woods come the next turning of the calendar. But very likely it's something we've never seen before, or at least that's the way I'm betting.

I've highlighted one passage.

So, as long as we're all in this alien country in which all the landmarks are familiar, but not entirely so, and changed in some vague way at their foundations, it won't hurt us to sit down and catch our breath and realize that, in the end, we are all that we have, and to find, if not joy in that, at least some comfort. Coats against the cold, as the late Guy Clark would have said. I don't know what's coming next. (Truly, at this point, I don't even want to guess.) But there will be places to stand against it, if needs be. Those are the places in which we still can have faith in hope, and where we can see through the storm the golden light of one candle in one window. That should be enough for now.

Picking these places to stand will be the essence of your resistance. Think about them carefully. Although the e-universe exists to rush our thoughts, this is the time to step aside and consider choices carefully. My own resistance will be here, where I live.

But Charlie is right. Give it a rest this weekend. Ignore Trump's idiotic tweets and the death throes of Democrats in "opposition." Take care of business at home. Whether by blood, circumstance or choice, family is a fundamental building block. Indulge it.

Then, when the holiday season is over ...