What's in a president?  I think of that as I am reminded that today, in the United States, people remember President's Day.  Set aside as a day for the nation to recall and remember its presidents, particularly George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, President's Day invokes many things across the broad span of American opinion.  Some think of these individuals with immense admiration, others with undisguised disdain, still others with a mixture of skepticism, thankfulness, maybe awe.  For Washington, debates continue to rage over his ownership of slaves and whether or not he was a more than a Deist, that he was in fact a Christian.  For Lincoln, we appreciate how he emancipated the slaves and held the country together during one of the darkest periods in its history or, for others, how he violated the laws of habeas corpus during the Civil War and violated states' rights by not allowing the South to go its own way. Some even accuse him of ending an economic model (slavery) that, they claim, was actually good for the country.
     However we remember these men (and to this point they've all been men) as well as their forty-two counterparts, we do so because, like it or not, they have impacted the planet as few other people have. Although in some way every one of us has impacted the planet, American presidents have surely impacted it in ways that far exceed our own.
      In other ways, however, their impact is quite small.  Many centuries ago, when asked by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar to interpret a dream, the prophet Daniel, after offering his take on it, added, "It is God who establishes rulers."  In other words, over and beyond every ruler and his or her actions and machinations, whimsical, deliberate, thoughtful, or otherwise, lies a fulcrum of purpose more profound than they, and we, can imagine. Big or small, we humans stride a planet whose ultimate design, purpose, and destiny we really cannot fully describe.  We may predict, we may cogitate, be it on the basis of geopolitical and scientific assessments or sacred writings, about its end, but we quickly forget that even the most hegemonic ruler is, in the last battle, merely--and only--mortal. Ultimately, he or she, like all of us, doesn't really know the full extent of his place.
     God or not, we walk in a singularly unfathomable universe.