The first photograph, taken in the back garden at Paradise Village where I live, reminds me of the present political situation in Washington D.C.  Today’s photographs remind me also of what our country could be if the clowns who are in the majority in both houses on Capital Hill would get to the job they were elected to do. I lived in McLean, Virginia, across the river from the District of Columbia during the Nixon years, and Watergate happened while I lived there. I was a lot younger then than I am now, and perhaps my younger self was less easy to disturb than my older self is now. I didn’t think the country was in danger of losing its character in those old days, but I can’t get accustomed, I don’t want to get accustomed, to having Donald Trump as my President; but he is the one who won the election and he is definitely my President. I feel the country is at risk with him at the helm.  I didn’t think the country was in danger of slipping into something that could not be recovered even when Mr. Nixon was President. I knew some of the people who were in charge of keeping the country safe.  Some of them were Democrats and some of them were Republicans. Both groups had a few crazy people among them, and some of those people were racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic and unreliable when it came to maintaining a country that I wanted our country to be. But the country was not in danger of slipping into a state of being that would have changed its character to something that would have been an embarrassment to me.  One of my bicycling buddies was the Secretary of the Army, a Republican. He was appointed to his job by Richard Nixon. He was a very good, responsible person in a job that was difficult to do well, and he did it well. 

The man who is President now is an embarrassment.  He seems to me to be someone who makes up stories that he wants to believe and that he wants the country to believe.  He seems to me to be unreliable as a leader. I am afraid for my country.