Recovery

I'm fighting off the remains of a very bad cold or sinus infection that really had me down and out on Sunday. And when I woke up Monday, my left eye was swollen and red; that whole side of my face felt puffy and somewhat numb. I feel much better today, but still very tired and wrung out from all the work my body is doing to repel whatever microscopic invaders had wreaked such damage.

Maybe it's a bit of fevered delirium left over from my illness, but it occurred to me this morning that our body politic appears to be going through something very similar. Over the past six years our country has fallen into a kind of illness. If you read my blog or any of the others in my blogrolls, you know the symptoms. We even know exactly which organisms have caused this sickness; they've worked right out in the open, barely trying to conceal the damage they were doing to our country, to our government, to our Constitution.

But like any relatively robust body, our country, over time, has begun to reject the invaders. The recent mid-term elections could perhaps have been the break of a long fever. Our heads are still groggy and our limbs still weak, but with the break of the fever, perhaps we can now start on the long road to recovery. And it will be a long recovery; a lot of damage has been done. There are still bitter pills to swallow and we could all use a good dose of chicken soup.

And when we are recovered, healthy again in our democracy, we can start to stem the spread of our disease, help those in Britain and in Australia; those that followed too closely and caught whatever it was that we had. We can help those who we trampled in our delirium in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will take a long time - recovery is rarely quick or easy.

At the end of that recovery we can look back on this as just one of those illnesses that we all go through, soon to be forgotten in the renewed glow of health.