By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Good Solstice to you. This is the long anticipated moment of returning summer light, of life lived out in the open, a surge of enthusiasm shouting at the top of its lungs, naked and reveling in the warmth of the season. A period of visibility, of engagement. A time to let it all hang out.
That’s the language we traditionally use to describe the feeling of expansion and freedom summer provides us, and language, as we know, is symbolic of our social and psychic experience. Summer is that time when we traditionally peel off clothes, pare back layers of complexity and strip away the isolation and intensity that winter encourages.
Politics are prone to take a breather around this time and get pretty silly, like the summer a few years back when Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin held sway as national court jesters. Or consider last summer, when Obama and Romney launched the most vapid, unrevealing and uninteresting presidential campaign of all time. This year that may not be the case, mainly because what’s been exposed under the watchful eye of the turbulent heavens is not acceptable in too many ways to count.