Merry Christmas

A couple of weeks ago I was in New York City visiting with my daughter Kate and her husband, Ben.

Kate produces commercials for an internet firm and Ben, a very talented actor, is pursuing his career options in the theatre.

Kate is the child who, like me, was bitten by the political bug that seems to be part of the Fahey-McGuire gene pool.

In the years between college and graduate school, she had the privilege of working for Mayor Miner as her scheduler and got an up close and personal education about politics on all levels.

Like me, she possesses a very dim view of the current occupant on the White House.

What I learned, on a walk with her through lower Manhattan, is that she has a very real fear about the future of the country under Trump.

“Do you think the country can survive him?” she asked me.

“Sure I do,” I replied.

The country has weathered more serious crisis I pointed out to her.

We managed to break free from England in the Revolutionary War.

We almost broke apart during the Civil War.

We managed to last through two world wars and get through the Great Depression in between them.

All of that occurred before I was born, I reminded her.

During my lifetime, we navigated our way through Vietnam, which was my first experience with friends and high school classmates being sent off to fight in a distant land with many of them returning home in body bags.

As that war was coming to a close, we experienced Watergate and the criminal investigation of the Nixon Administration ending in his resigning from office.

I told her how fears ran very high during that crisis, that he would defy the other branches of government adding additional uncertainty to the outcome.

In the end, however, the rule of law prevailed and the nation endured yet again.

We talked about the attack on September 11, 2001 which supplanted the assassination of President Kennedy as the defining moment the nation has experienced during my life time.

I assured her that, as bleak as things seem right now, our history and spirit is greater than any one man.

As I think about our conversation and all of the events we recounted during it, I began to consider all of the great figures who came and went and the way we adjusted to their passing.

My parents told me how stunned they were at the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt as World War II was coming to a close.

After leading the country out of the Great Depression and through Pearl Harbor and the war, they couldn’t imagine having another president and also wondered if the nation would survive.

I saw how devastated they were by the murder of John F. Kennedy and how the country came to a standstill during the days that followed as he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

I remember how numb I was at the murder of Martin Luther King.

It seemed that just as that was wearing off, Robert Kennedy was assassinated and I began to question what kind of society we had become.

I began to think of the passing of people in my life.

When my mother passed away at the end of 1991, my sister, Jane, was less than a month away from giving birth to my nephew Conor.

At the conclusion of her funeral mass, Father Ahern looked at Jane and told us that the Irish have a saying, “One goes and one comes.”

This past Easter Sunday my younger sister Mary died unexpectedly.

A week or so later, my daughter, Meghan, announced she was expecting her second child.

One goes and one comes.

At this writing we await the imminent arrival of Jane Diana.

I’m confident that her life will be filled with promise, happiness and joy.

Secure in that belief, I know that the world will go on, we will endure whatever crisis we encounter and, as always, America will thrive.

Merry Christmas.