I’m holding my breath in anticipation that it’s a new day with an expectation I’ll turn blue and pass out. Today, the United States inaugurates a new president, which also means the news cycle will change unless it doesn’t. For the very same things, a segment of the media gave the outgoing president a pass on, they’ll switch on their righteous indignation that our new U.S. leader should be so lax in his commitment to do the right thing. After four years of telling audiences that their messiah figure was walking on water, they’ll ensure that the very same segment of our population knows that the new leadership is going down the path of destruction.

In four hours from when I first started writing this, the honeymoon that never began will be over. We are no longer the “United” States; we are simply a country of other people loaded into a catapult pointed at a massif, about to be splattered into the wall of propaganda. The clown act we are performing is tiresome, and I would simply like to turn the channel away from this slapstick folly of bad actors, but the truth is that I’m not really holding my breath; I’m breathing and thus still a witness to this cruel theater of the radically absurd.

This last year, Caroline read SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard to me as our audiobook in the car. With the pandemic curtailing most of our driving because she was working from home, we had to make efforts to get out and drive or bring the book into the house so she could read to me while we pretended to drive. Along the way, I would often think of the Roman Circus and its parallels with the media landscape we are trying to live with, but my sense has been that we are being thrown into the arena of mental warfare, like the Christians to the lions.

I come back to this later in the day with a new president and a return to the America I grew up in, one of diversity. I have no insight if anything will fundamentally change as I’ve grown cynical over my years of witnessing promises that have amounted to much about nothing. Celebrating a woman as vice president is great, but that it’s taken us this long is indicative of the glacial pace of our progress. The president that just left is evidence that just below the surface lies lingering hate and intolerance. I, for one, obviously do not have the patience to see my lifetime pass by with only incremental change having been gained, but then again, I grew up in the firestorm of a cultural revolution back in the 1970s.

Maybe this next bit of time on our journey will be another cultural revolution, but one that captures the masses and not just the fringe. The mainstream of America is lost in the morass of mediocrity, afraid of dramatic change. The comfort found in benign realities where banality and obedience to dogma are had is a complaisance that shelters people from needing to make changes, not systemic change alone but personal change.

I suppose I should explain my interpretation of just what change is. For me, change is the ability to go with the flow of what we don’t know as it comes to light. From Korean popstars singing about Gangnam style, stupid cat memes, immigrant neighbors, trying foods we’ve never had before, or wearing a mask until everyone is safe from needing to die prematurely due to an ugly virus. If your job disappears, you might have to retrain, but you should have been expanding your skillset the entire time, as who knows how markets evolve? Anticipate that the status quo is elusive at best and is subject to be different tomorrow than it was today.