We went to the beach yesterday, to try to survive. Our first instinct, and a good one, was to go to the coast and watch huge waves crashing on the Northern California shore.
A wave doesn’t favor or forgive, nor does it seek to injure. It has no antagonists or allies. It just rolls in, as it is destined to do from its inception. From miles and hemispheres away, it simply moves, unstoppable. A surf teacher once advised, never fight a wave; it only seeks the shore.
They were enormous and deadly. They gained height and surged forward, line after line of swelling energy, rising breathlessly, their faces sometimes ominously dark, sometimes whipped white, then releasing a cargo of whitewater to spill toward the shore. The roar like a phalanx of engines charging, invisible, from somewhere back there where the sky meets the water.
But they were also comforting. They came in on Wednesday the way they came in on Tuesday—the day we showed what we are as a country. The way they’ve come in for eons, and the way they’ll come after we’re a completely lost nation, or one strengthened by experience and wisdom.
Waves only seeking the shore. Undeterred by human ambition or folly. Constant. Inexorable. We don’t matter. We can struggle vainly against them, possibly to our death. Or we can understand what they are and wait for the moment when a lull will allow us to get out past where they’re crashing.
So this was comforting, Wednesday of all days.
(Which is not to say we’re going to roll over and take any of this shit.)