As usual, my birthday came two days before America’s. It makes me think of something Samuel Johnson said: “the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully.”

As for me, I’m doing fine. I’m enjoying good health, and the effect of the back surgeries I had during the past year are almost stuffed back into the special Sheol where they belong. I gave myself a birthday gift of new state-of-the-art hearing aids that are making my every moment bright with relief that I’ve escaped the growing isolation of deafness. My brain still works well enough to allow me to continue writing. In a couple of weeks, I will publish online a travel narrative/memoir – 12,000 Miles of Road Thoughts. I’m told it is well-written and engaging, and writing it has allowed me to come to terms with all sorts of things. I am blessed with the unqualified love of a good woman and the ongoing succor of many friendships. I woke on this latest birthday with a strong sense of well-being and gratitude and what Christians know as reconciliation.

My feelings about America’s birthday are less positive. Mark Shields once said about a wedding anniversary, “I celebrated it; my wife observed it.” It’s beyond my capabilities to celebrate a country so divided, so dangerous, so full of hostility as we are; I am observing it. I’ve tried to persuade myself to apply the glass half-empty, half-full nostrum, but it has not helped.  It would be a comfort to believe that the democratic experiment is failing or it is thriving, but either position would be simplistic and reductionist.

The country is painfully and perilously divided. A major reason for this is widespread resistance to recognizing complexity. The media encourages such thinking with their mindless adherence to either/or questions. “Mr. Secretary, are we winning or losing in the fight against – choose one – cancer, Russian aggression, gun safety?  And those polls that ask whether America is going in the right direction or the wrong direction are pointless. All of which is to say I’m more comfortable with mixed feelings about the state of the country than with the glass half-empty, half-full way of thinking. But on this Fourth of July, I’m finding that difficult.

The Supreme Court’s decisions in its recent term are dismaying and alarming. The jurisprudence applied does not bother me all that much. Lawyers are trained to argue flat or round, and the ablest ones, such as those on the court, can make a case for anything. A more serious matter than jurisprudence and political and legal philosophy is the emotional makeup of the justices. Thomas and Alito seethe with anger and resentment, and it affects their thinking. Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch are similarly maladjusted, though they are less vocal about it. The conservative Chief Justice has become a sort of water boy for the varsity. This untouchable coalition of the enraged, is doing much to make the democratic experiment fail.

If I could, I would give my country a gift on this birthday. I would change the questions asked of judicial nominees at confirmation hearings. Any senator who can read should know the judicial tendencies of nominees before the hearings begin. The more useful questions would somehow gauge each nominee’s level of all-purpose anger and their habit of mind regarding complexity/simplicity.

I’m getting old, but I still expect to see another birthday. I hope our democratic experiment enjoys one, too.