American Sunset

And nightfall lies ahead

I took this photo last spring, in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. The Washington Monument is to the right, obviously, and the Capitol dome would be found a bit farther to the right. It was perhaps my fourth visit to our nation’s capital, and everytime I go there I wonder if it will be the last one. After all, you can never truly know what lies ahead in life.

There’s a strange sense of the unknown that lies just a few days ahead of us now. Large numbers of people in California have had their lives upended, literally, and I can only imagine what comes next for them. Our nation itself also seems to be in peril, not from any physical destruction but from an assault on many of the customs and norms that have held America together for a very long time.

I’ll be evacuating from TikTok in the coming days, where I’ve been creating content for several years now. It helped me to survive the previous Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic, and now I don’t know what will get me through the turbulence that lies ahead. Maybe I’ll have to just stare at this DC sunset and draw strength from days that are already behind us, because a long and unsettling night is about to fall, in Washington and everywhere else.