From a few years ago ...

Across a table, slouched in our chairs, my dear friend talks to me of his visit to FDR's library. He says FDR's office was the most powerful of the rooms of the place, the papers arranged to be "left as they were" to mark the incarnation of a great person.

He says, the more he thinks about it, the more he believes that FDR was one of those rare historical figures positioned at a fateful nexus, that the direction of civilization was somewhat determined by the integrity of the person in that station at that time. He tosses out adversities: the depression, the coming wars with Germany and Japan, the atomic race. Then he states: FDR presided over them all, with grace.

Is it too much to say that FDR had the United States's best interest in mind, that he advocated for the citizenry, for the idea of the country? Some vague memories of controversy nag at our confidence. We are perhaps naïve and need a role model. A long-dead president buried under palimpsests is an easy fill for the need.

I say, You know, so much of the nation's infrastructure can be traced to that reign. To support this claim, my friend adds that Mr. D., a diehard conservative, voted Democratic until the '90s, solely out of respect for FDR.

Together we decide that in tragedy FDR seemed to seek regeneration from within; he tilled the country's resources and built a bountiful nation. From that came our beloved prosperity.

The grief is unavoidable: Look how incapable our current administration is! It abandons, even pillages, the country's resources in pursuit of irrelevant goals and careless wrath upon amorphous, arbitrary enemies.

We risk wondering, what if it were the current administration leading the nation out of the Great Depression and World War II? Or ... World War III?