Something is dying today at noon Eastern Standard Time.

Not everyone holding their breath on Inauguration Day is . . .  a liberal, a radical, an anarchist, a socialist . . .  a whatever. Click “Trump is the waterbeetle of American politics and he’ll keep on flabbergasting” to read conservative columnist George F. Will‘s Washington Post opinion piece. Wednesday’s Washington Post is worth a read today. So is the NYT photo of the President-Elect and new First Lady in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln (look closely at Lincoln’s face) at the Lincoln Memorial.

I believe in the resurrection of hope. But I experience today as a Good Friday and Holy Saturday kind of day, a day when collective madness delivers the Oval Office and the nuclear codes into the hands of a waterbeetle.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017.