By Michael F. Duggan
On the evening of November 8, 2016, I started watching the election returns. It was early and all of the pundits on the cable propaganda stations for both sides were charged and upbeat. After about a half hour, I decided to watch a movie, so I put a DVD in the player. It was the 1995 Robert Downey, Jr. historical comedy-drama, Restoration.
I would check on the election coverage every half hour to 45 minutes. Around 10:00 (I don’t remember the exact time), some of the experts noted that things were not going the Democrat’s way in a couple of key states. I read a lot of Marcus Aurelius, and know that most things are out of my hands, and so I went to bed.
The night was quiet, darker and more quiet than usual, and during the few times I woke up overnight, I knew what had happened.
Then I had this crazy idea: perhaps if I did not listen to the news, perhaps the election would remain in a state of superposition, like Schrodinger’s cat in quantum mechanics, and that if I turned on the radio in the morning, it would decohere into a fixed outcome I did not like (it was like an infant who believes that the world goes away when he closes his eyes in a game of peekaboo). When I got up, I did not turn on the radio. I left the house to go to work, and drove to the train station in silence, but I knew. That was eight years ago.
Last night I tried to watch a movie again (an old American Experience documentary about Alexander Hamilton), but I grew edgy and wend upstairs early to read (some Marcus Aurelius, but also a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.). Around 10:30, I came down and saw that the PBS coverage was calling North Carolina. I had seen this play (or one very much like it) before. I went back upstairs and read for a couple more hours and went to bed.
Again, the night was unusually dark and quiet. Again I had this crazy idea that if I didn’t check the news, that events would be suspended in superposition. I got up and did not turn on the radio. I checked my Facebook account and the second thing I saw was a friend who posted, “I guess this is who we really are.” Events had de-cohered once again. In a conversation a week or more ago not specifically on politics, a friend of mine who knows a lot more than I do about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, told me that the only real dignity in life is to accept the world as it is without complaint.
I know that elections aren’t like particle physics.