What He Said, John Cole edition. (Or The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul)

Warning: science free, got out of bed on the wrong side content below.

John Cole over on Balloon Juice had this to say as a comment on yet another shoe dropping on the whole torture mess:

I really don’t know how long it will take to repair the damage these bedwetting jackasses in the Bush White House have done to our international standing, our intelligence agencies, our military, and our political culture.

It happened that I was thinking about just this as I was glancing at the morning news and getting my son ready for school today. I think it was this story that got me going. (h/t Atrios).

And reading it, I had my answer to John’s question. It is going to take us decades to dig out from the damage the last eight years have done to our country, our politics, our liberty and our world — if we ever do. (Think 44 BCE.). Grandiose thinking for 9-ish in the morning, recovering from the flurry of getting my son to school not more than a standard deviation or two late.

But that was what was framing my feeling of depressed anger.

Whoever signs my paychecks, my foundational job is to do whatever I can to make the world in which my son raises any children he might have better than the one I welcomed him into, better than the one he lives in now.

Given the depth and breadth of the damage the Bush years have done to our civic life, our habitat, and — as the story above implied — our capacity to repair the evils done in our name, then it could easily take all of the twenty or thirty years left to my Biblically sanctioned promise of hale life just to get back to zero for my son.

That’s the bad news. The good news, or rather, the thought that lifted me out of my gloom is that I have got nothing better to do with that time. Might as well get on with it, no?

Image:   Tessai Tomioka, “Embarking on a Raft,” 1924.   Source:  Wikimedia Commons

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