Time for a Breather, Revisited

Time for a Breather, Revisited

With all the political and meteorological news this past week, from the Vice Presidential debate last Monday to the literally unprintable language on the Donald Trump tape released this past weekend, to still more email hacking by the Russians (this time including some Hillary Clinton speeches and private emails of her campaign manager), to a Hurricane that hit the coast hard but mercifully spared Edgefield County, it is time for a breather once again. The deadline for this column is just before this past Sunday’s debate, so rather than writing as if I had a crystal ball and guessing the outcome that readers of this column will already know, I’ll rerun a short column from July, 2015, on why taking a step back, stopping and smelling the roses (and, in summer, the peaches) is important. Here is that column, with more pleasant thoughts than spring to mind in October, 2016.

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My wife Carol and I attended the quarterly “Convocation Meeting” of all our regional churches from Aiken County to Abbeville County this past Sunday afternoon. One of the Deacons representing Bishop Andrew Waldo in Columbia said that her head was still spinning from all the events of the past three weeks. Not only were there two momentous Supreme Court decisions, plus the whole series of events surrounding the Confederate Flag at the State House, but The Episcopal Church (the official name includes that capital “T”) had also wrapped up its national convention, elected a new nationwide Presiding Bishop (the first African American Presiding Bishop in the history of our Church, succeeding the first female Presiding Bishop after a nine-year term of office), and passed a resolution allowing Priests to sanctify same sex marriages in every state of the union. Too much has happened in too short a time for any of us fully to digest it all.

So, it’s time for a breather!

Members of my Church, members of other churches, and members of no church at all – all of us in South Carolina probably are feeling the same emotional fatigue that I feel today. Some of us are elated and others disappointed, but I suspect that all of us are more than a little bit tired. Now it is time for contemplation, for those of us with differing viewpoints to get together and talk quietly over a glass of sweet tea, to talk about the hot weather this July and hope it rains again soon, and to enjoy the abundance of peaches and other local fruits and vegetables that this season bestows so bountifully. For the regular readers of this column, please accept my sincere thanks – and let’s now just set a spell, and enjoy the day, the season, and one another’s company.

It is great to be a South Carolinian, and especially one from Edgefield County, this day. My personal best wishes to all of the readers of The Edgefield Advertiser!

Robert Scott