On the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles from the pain rippling through Europe which I mentioned yesterday, many Americans are beginning to talk about the next presidential campaign.  A number of people have already expressed their interest in stepping into the office, and no small number of people are indicating they are leaning in that direction.
     Former president Richard Nixon once remarked that, "The presidency is a killer of a job."  How true.  Yet year after year after year, many people want it anyway.  I hope that whoever enters the office does so acutely aware that any power it may bequeath him or her is so terribly ephemeral.  It's futile, really, a wisp of hegemony that vanishes as soon as it is implemented in this extraordinarily complex world.  It will not last.  All that will remain are the convictions, moral, political, cultural, or otherwise (although these, in truth, are linked) that underlay and impel it.
     In a moral universe, a universe divinely imbued with a moral compass and authority, only ideas, in the end, will be real and true.  I hope the next president finds not so much accomplishment as he or she does meaning, for him or herself, for America, for the world. I hope that a greater good, one that we cannot always easily see but one that is always and supernally there, will triumph.
    In the face of material and eternal happenstance and contingency, we are so very, very small.  What does human "power" really mean in such a massive and incomprehensible universe?