But…what if we can’t keep it?  What if our Republic is destroyed?   Do we have a Plan B? It never seriously occurred to me that perhaps we couldn’t keep it.  I was only four years old when I read “Ben and Me”, a charming little biography of Benjamin Franklin for children, ostensibly written by his pet mouse Amos.  Ever since, I have carried with me Franklin’s famous statement naming the new form of government the Founders had created—a Republic—and his warning of its vulnerab

I have been dumbfounded since Trump’s re-election.  (Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “lacking the power of human speech”)  For an erstwhile writer, this is profoundly dismaying.  But I have literally been unable to conjure any words or images that could grasp and express how I experience this unprecedented calamity that has befallen us all.  And with each additional stupefying blow to all that we hold holy, my incapacity to speak about how I feel only deepened. Until yesterday.