The next administration will have a lot of repairing to do

To The Daily Sun,

Imagine November 3rd. Eviction papers have been served on both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Old Post Office. Sufficient Manhattan moving vans have been booked and paid for in advance. Likewise a crew to meet them at the curb to heft everything back up a mid-town escalator. Likewise a fence company – the same that put it up – will come back to un-barricade Lafayette Square. All the postal drop boxes and sorting machines that can be found, will be reinstalled. All the not-yet-American children snatched in partisan frenzy will be found, freed and reunited with family. A Statuette of Liberty to those not yet found will be placed at the border.

Plans for other reversals, inevitable but better now than four years hence, have also been readied. Federal offices hither and yon, their windows opened to the people's air, not the party's. The rule-cutters' books, both executive and legislative, will have their pages scrubbed to the point of transparency. Ambassador-donors abroad will be called home and exchanged for ones who never bought their way into government.

These kinds of reversals will be easy... just change the locks, sheets and towels, and leave a light on for the next residents. Never to be reversed, though, are the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, tombstones and hospitalizations; the loss of life, work and pay; the waste of time, money and industry; the cheapening of American talent for little more than quick-and-dirty deception, brainwashing and crass loyalty. Economists will run those numbers and declare the losses rival the national debt. And like the national debt, will probably never be repaid.

Repairs, on the other hand, will be even more costly than the reversals. Discoveries of breakdowns, impending hazards, betrayals, sabotage and intransigence will preoccupy many next administrations. It will be like living at the foot of a steep, eroded mountainside prone to sudden and overwhelming landslides. Of necessity, presidents and the whole population – deputized professors, parents, proprietors and pedestrians alike – will have to bare shovels more often than arms, and be prepared to use them.

Stuart Leiderman

Center Barnstead