Not Even Daffodils...

... can dispel the return of existential dread?

Umm...Happy New Year? Or is it already be too late for that?

This is my first Substack “Post” of 2026. For a few new subscribers: I don’t actually “Post” very often. What I do mostly on Substack is the more spontaneous “Notes.” But I have been gathering some thoughts here beside by the fire on this cold but sunny Sunday here in West Bumfugue (Nashville, TN adjacent) that I hope readers will find worthy of a more substantial slice of their attention.

Today’s workstation in West Bumfuque, TN

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Behold: Daffodils!

I posted something on Facebook last week that, sadly and unexpectedly, reveals just how dispirited the world has become.

I have a couple of clumps of daffodils in my front yard. I have always taken their reappearance in the dead of winter as a harbinger of the coming spring, however many weeks away the equinox may be.

On Saturday I noticed that the daffodils had already begun their annual resurrection. I made a photo and posted it to Facebook, thinking that would offer something to be cheerful about in the face of what has started out as an even more depressing year than the one that just ended – which I’m pretty sure we all wanted to think was not possible.

Well, it appears that my desire to inject a little light into the gloom has run head-on into a heat shield of despair.

The photo in question appears at the top of this post. I posted it with this simple caption:

It seems I might be wrong about that.

As I write on Sunday January 18, the post has garnered about 40 reactions and 30 comments. That is actually a lot for me, given my pretense of ignoring social media.

What surprises me is the number of comments that seem to echo this one:

Or this one:

Admittedly, it’s not a broad sampling. It’s just me and my less-than-two-thousand “friends” on Facebook.

What surprised me is that the gloomy sentiment comes from a community that I would ordinarily think of as optimistic, progressive, and, above all, hopeful.

Here are a few more examples from the comments:

I trust y’all get the gist.

And I thought I was supposed to be cynic here!

Now: Duck... and Cover!

My favorite name for the current occupant of the executive branch of the United States Federal Government comes from the Substack writer Jeff Tiedrich, who calls him “Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants.” I can’t do any better than that, so I’ll just call him Grandpa.

And it seems that all Grandpa has done in his first year back in what Tiedrich calls “the Oval Bordello” is bring an unprecedented level of despair to the people I think of as my friends, real or virtual.

When I think of whatever constituency I might be addressing here, I think mostly of my boomer contemporaries. We started out in a world where classroom lessons were interrupted by an exercise called “Duck and Cover” – where we were instructed to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack, as if hiding under a wooden table would would provide any meaningful protection as the entire classroom, school, city, state, country and world were vaporized.

It occurs to me that readers of younger generations might not believe me. Well, have a look:

I think Bert The Turtle had a better chance in his shell than we did under our desks.

In the six or seven decades since our elementary school years, some of us have come to appreciate that we lived in a “postwar” geo-political environment that was instrumental in staving off that seeming inevitability.

At some point, we all had to make a compromise with a threatening world. We managed to put the prospect of nuclear annihilation out of our minds long enough to get educated, start careers, raise families, and do what humans have done for millennia prior to discovering the unspeakable power lurking within every atom. A stable, postwar world order allowed for some measure of optimism – even idealism – among the generation raised in the global village of electronic media.

But the past week’s rhetorical outbursts over the status of Greenland have put the foundations of that world order in fresh doubt.

And, on some subliminal level, perhaps what we are experiencing is a return of the dark, existential dread that we found lurking under our desks in elementary school.

Long Ago and Far Away

Civic responsibility – the bedrock of any attempt at self-governance – mandates that citizens maintain some interest in the larger world. But now it seems that every glance at the news is just one more swirl into a whirlpool of doom.

I am trying to be optimistic (see: daffodils!). I’d like to believe that the institutions embedded in our Constitution are resilient enough to survive the current maelstrom.

But the social contract we are living under was drafted long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. The compromises made to form our imperfect union in the 18^th century have long since outlived their usefulness here in the 21^st century.

I will spare you the details of what’s not working. Suffice it to say for now that the distorted representation of the U.S. Senate made it too easy for a miscreant like Mitch McConnell to assure the Restoration of Grandpa.

But the problem is not so much Grandpa as it is the 70+ million who voted for him and the malevolent sycophants who are really grinding the gears, and who will inherit the wheelhouse if and when he does finally die in office.

I wonder how so many people could not see through the fraud and corruption, or anticipate the incompetence.

Then I remember who the alternative was and how all that came about and... well, I’ll stop there, that’s not the point of this post.

Just in case it’s not clear: the point of this post is the apparent return subliminal existential dread at the hands of a man showing all the symptoms of frontal dementia.

I mean, hardly a day goes by that I don’t wonder if we’re all really dead and this is the Hell they tried to warn us about.

Maybe This Doesn’t End Well?

Sadly, frighteningly – I worry that this is what it might be coming down to:

Think for a moment how we got to the Constitution in the first place: It began with what we call The Revolution, which (as Ken Burns’ most recent documentary series underscores) was in fact a civil war between Patriots and Loyalists¹. When the Patriots won and resulting Confederation faltered, the Federal Republic was created. But we should not lose sight of the fact that, though removed by several years, the instigating factor was a bloody conflict that utilized all the tools of destruction available at the time.

The original Constitution provides for modification in the form of amendments, but the process is convoluted and byzantine. The most significant changes we’ve seen to the original constitution were enacted in the 1860s. The ratification of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments abolished slavery, defined citizenship, defined equal protection under the law, and secured voting rights for the formerly enslaved (though that one took another century of resistance to attain). Not a whole lot has changed since then.

So here’s a Reality Check: those fundamental changes to the Constitution were not adopted until after another, even bloodier, civil war.

With all that in mind, try not to see any footage from the streets of Minneapolis over the past week.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Now here we are, reeling from the inadequacies of a system that was devised more than two centuries ago.

And then there is Grandpa Befuddlepants himself. Something I recently read reminded me: almost everything Donald Trump as ever put his name on has ended in bankruptcy. And now he’s putting his name on the whole damn country.

And there’s nothing like an a little bit of economic calamity to plunge a society into chaos.

Is it any wonder, then, that a generation that overcame the innate anxiety of “duck and cover” in order to build a world of unprecedented prosperity is feeling a renewed sense of existential dread?

This morning I read about the demonstrations in the capital city of Nuuk to express Greenland’s rejection of Gramps desire to annex their island nation.

“I thought this day couldn’t get any worse,” one participant told the Associated Press after leaning about Grandpa’s threat to put tariffs on any country that objects to his deranged territorial greed, “but it just did.”

Well, Greenland’s, that’s our world and welcome to it. It’s like you’ve already been annexed psychologically.

For more than ten years now, we’ve been asking, “where is the fucking bottom?” – only to plunge to ever lower lows of bewilderment.

And now here we are, at a point where even the light of fresh daffodils in the winter garden finds it hard to shine through.

So, here… have some more daffodils!

More daffodils, near Erin, TN – Late February, 2011. This one is called “A Matter of Life or Death”

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1. When the challengers to authority win, it’s called a “revolution.” When the existing power structure wins, it was a “civil war.”