The Changed Climate of Political Behavior

Three times Joe Biden said to Nixon, “I appreciate

your sympathy,” when Richard Nixon offered it to him, because

his first wife had been killed in a car crash.  The fatal date,

December 19, 1972, of this disaster was

in an era when political opponents sympathized with one

another, while not distanced as unsocially as now the norm,

one that is hardly normal, and the reason we’ve begun

a process in which we are deluged with hate-hail before a storm

that may lead to a deluge in which no one’s likely to be saved,

since there’s been a huge change of climate of political behavior,

and we are as unable to correct this problem as was Noah, when

behavior was so bad he saved, more partisan than savior,

pathetically few lives except three racially related men.

and, of course, a lot of animals, now facing doom

because, most sadly, we’re not taking care of their environment,

so that soon will not be on our planet as much room

as here once was for Shem and Ham and Japheth inside Noah’s tent.

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Inspired by an article in the 11/15/20 Wall Street Journal by Luke Nichter, a professor of history at Texas A&M University—Central Texas.