Sometimes, you’ve got to go through it to get to it.
That’s a personal motto with which I have occasionally consoled myself since I was a teenager. It means that for as much as we naturally seek to avoid the unpleasant situation, to find a way over or around it, there are times in this life when the only option is to go through it, to endure the unendurable thing and pick up the pieces on the other side.
That philosophy has succored me through breakups, deaths and career reversals. I find myself turning to it again to gird for the administration of the 45th president.
For years, many of us have sought to avoid, to go over or around, the consequences of the Republican Party’s retreat from seriousness.
Meaning its studied outrage, its practiced hysteria, its obstructionism, its bigotry, its withdrawal into a facts-free alternate universe, its embrace of human cartoons like Sarah Palin, Ben Carson and Herman Cain.