“It is what it is,” I often say in acknowledgment and regret. Whether or not I might influence the future, I can’t change the past. Friends startle me when they say tautologies aren’t helpful. Why won’t they try to accept the things they cannot change?

Then I recall a time in my teens when I told my father about an event that distressed me. I don’t remember what it was. What I remember is my anger at his response: “It happens.” Feeling dismissed, I fired back, “Of course it happens. Everything that happens, happens. Does that mean we’re never allowed to be upset?”

Gradually I’m absorbing that people need to process whatever feelings they feel, each in their own fashion, at whatever length they must. Someone in grief or shock may need to tell their story again and again, not to convey the facts but to process and feel heard. I’m learning to listen with more patience.

​Of course, if their repetitive woe is about a coffee stain on the carpet, sooner or later I’ll tune out. It is what it is.

Image: Photo by Christian Allard on Unsplash.

How did we get so polarized? My perspective gained from a Politico interview of Jon Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2021). I haven’t read the book, but here’s my understanding. The period after the Civil War shared many features with our own: rapid demographic and technological change, high immigration, growing economic disparities, and racial and political violence. A pitched battle in 1874 temporarily overthrew the government of Louisiana. Presidents were fatally shot after the elections of 1880 and 1900.

By the mid-1900s, the U.S. settled into a degree of consensus on overall policies and decorum in sorting out the details. Members of Congress spoke of “my friend across the aisle” without irony. Politics joined sex and religion as private matters to avoid in casual conversation. This public civility came at a price. As passions eased, voter turnout fell sharply, especially among the poor and marginalized. Civility favors the status quo. 

Three takeaways stick with me​:

1. No political culture is perfect. There are always tradeoffs.
2. Strident political affiliation can offer a sense of identity. Hunger to belong increases as groups such as churches, unions, and bowling leagues decline.
3. As to the societal culture wars, politics reflects trends more than it shapes them. “The electoral system is good at putting people in power to pass or block legislation. It’s terrible at deciding what pronouns we should use or whatever,” Grinspan said. “It’s just not designed for what we’re asking it to do for us.

Image: President Grover Cleveland on the $1000 bill (discontinued). Elected in 1884 and 1892, Cleveland was the only previous president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

A truck filled with tennis balls overturned on our road last month, or so it appears. The thousands of green spheres littering our pavement and lawns actually dropped from common black walnut trees, native to North America. Removing the thick hull reveals a shell much tougher than those of English walnuts you find in grocery stores. If you manage to crack the shell, you’ll finally get down to the earthy, robust, slightly bitter meat, a luxury ingredient for baking.

If you leave the green balls where they fall, they will crunch under your tires and threaten your lawnmower blades. As they rot and mold, they will leave black stain on whatever they touch. A few will grow into majestic shade trees, with roots that poison the soil under the branches so nothing else can grow there.

​Is it a waste of nature’s edible bounty to rake them up for compost? Most would say no; the cost in labor outweighs the benefit in flavor. For a few rare souls, processing black walnuts by hand is worth the trouble. If they enjoy it, the laborious task becomes part of the benefit. As people who love to knit elaborate sweaters or make fine furniture can attest, major efforts don’t always pay for themselves in terms of dollars and cents, but by the creative satisfaction that comes from both process and product.

Lawn decorations of skeletons and gravestones are starting to come down. Election campaign yard signs may soon follow suit, and with luck the deluge of political emails and texts will ease. Plants are dying; trees are shedding their leaves. It’s the spooky season, the time between harvest and winter when darkness is closing in. In a modern tweak on an ancient observance, the end of Daylight Savings Time drives the point home.

Early Christians venerated their martyrs in a variety of local observances on sundry dates. Over time they added non-martyred saints and eventually all the dead in heaven. In the 700s, Pope Gregory III fixed All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 for all of Western Christendom, to coincide with the dedication of a chapel to “All the Saints” in Saint Peter’s in Rome.

With the day before (All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween) and the day after (All Souls’ Day, for the dead still in purgatory), this observance of the darkening time absorbed or inspired Samhain in Ireland and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Whether in remembrance of the saints, celebration of the ancestors, or terror of ghosts, death at this season takes center stage.

It’s not entirely coincidence that Election Day falls so soon after Halloween. Using the authority given it by Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress in 1845 set the date for federal elections as the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Most voters were farmers, who often lived a distance from their polling places. By early November the harvest was done, and the weather was still mild enough for travel. When Nov. l fell on a Tuesday, voting would take place a week later so as not to conflict with All Saints’ Day.

As for whether to approach Election Day with celebration or fingernail-biting fear, let alone metaphors of darkening and death, I leave it to you to decide.

Image: The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Nuremberg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel.