Lots of people–faculty, students, administrators, academic developers/curriculum designers–have done heroic work to get us to just okay and everyone deserves some applause. But now we’re in a different reality, one that will be with us probably forever–higher education where the majority of colleges and universities deliver a large share, if not the majority, of their courses in either a fully online or a hybrid mode.

Now that we’ve gotten through the panic phase, at least at my campus we are looking toward that future and trying to figure out the best ways to create innovative online courses that aren’t just last year’s F2F course stuffed into a laptop screen.

The problem is, at least here, that we’ve decided to put all of our eggs into one LMS basket–in our case, BlackBoard. I suspect most campuses around the world are similar for the simple reason that it’s much easier and more practical to try to limit faculty to one LMS. That way, when faculty or students have problems with an online course (there are always problems), a well-trained cadre of IT specialists can help resolve those problems based on their knowledge of one system. I get that.

But, and this is a really big but, limiting faculty to one platform for delivering online courses means that faculty are also limited to whatever innovations are possible within that platform. And it’s a fact that LMS platforms are designed to be the mid-sized sedans of the learning world. Everything works reasonably well, the system doesn’t break too often, and a certain amount of customization is possible.

Innovation? Not so much.

This is especially problematic when we consider the different learning styles of different segments of our student populations. For example, scholars of indigenous education in North America have emphasized how indigenous student learning styles are socially-oriented, while LMS systems are predicated largely on task-oriented course structures.

At my own institution, faculty who want to try different modalities, different platforms, are not prevented from doing so. However, we also cannot get any support from our dean’s office or our academic developers, because they are all in on the one LMS we’ve chosen to support. If I wanted to convert one of my courses to online with BlackBoard, I could join a cohort of colleagues and receive a $4,000 summer stipend to support that effort. If I want to do something outside the BlackBoard realm, best of luck to me.

I’m not suggesting that we should install three or four different LMSs on our campuses. That’s obviously not practical. But by not supporting faculty innovators working at the margins, we place upper limits on what might come of their work.

Many years ago, legendary IBM Chairman Thomas Watson wrote, “In IBM we frequently refer to our need for ‘wild ducks.’ The moral is drawn from a story by the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard who told of a man who fed the wild ducks flying south in great flocks each fall. After a while some of the ducks no longer bothered to fly south; they wintered in Denmark on what he fed them. In time they flew less and less. After three or four years they grew so lazy and fat that they found difficulty in flying at all. Kierkegaard drew his point: you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never go anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them.”

Alas, these days we don’t seem to be so interested in wild ducks.

When this crisis has passed, as it surely will, what are the odds that colleges and universities will say, “Okay, back to teaching exactly the way you used to”? I’d say those odds are very low. At my own university, we launched almost 5,000 online courses in just a few weeks. Someone, somewhere in the administration of the university is thinking or saying, “You know, we could teach a lot more students if we just kept up the online delivery, even at half the current rate.” And they would be right. And that wouldn’t be all bad, given that as a public university our mission is to provide access to quality learning opportunities to as many students as possible.

It’s also worth noting that more and more universities are talking about staying online for the Fall 2020 semester as one of several contingencies.

My worry is not that the university will decide to try to hang on to as many online courses as possible. My worry is that the university and the faculty will see this as a binary choice — courses offered entirely face to face or entirely online — and will forget that there is a third option — hybrid or blended courses, where students and faculty spend some time face to face and some time in online modes of learning and instruction.

One reason I worry that we’ll take a pass on hybrid courses is that a growing body of research across the disciplines demonstrates that student learning outcomes are often the highest in hybrid courses — higher than either option in that binary. Studies of student learning in the sciences, the humanities, and engineering all point to the particular advantages of hybrid courses for non-native English speakers, for students who have to work more than 20 hours per week, for students who have child or elder care responsibilities, and for students managing health issues.

Moreover, reducing the number of hours or days students are on campus reduces the university’s carbon footprint and saves our students money (they pay for less gas, less parking, and fewer expensive meals on campus). If they also have better learning outcomes, why wouldn’t we implement more hybrid courses?

The simple answer, and the one that I fear will control our decisions, is that hybrid courses are a pain in the ass to schedule. In the traditional scheduling model, each classroom on campus has a pre-defined number of slots that courses can be scheduled into and then that physical room is full. But hybrid courses that meet on variable schedules — perhaps face to face for the first couple of weeks, then every other week online, then face to face for the final three weeks — can bring the whole system crashing down. Registrars will have a fit.

But do we really think this is an insoluble problem? In a word, no. Somehow we manage to schedule courses that meet three days a week, two days a week, or one day a week, some for 90 minutes, some for 50 minutes, some for 2.5 hours. I think we have enough brain power on campus to figure out a way to schedule courses that meet every other week, or every third week, or whatever. It’s not possible to give faculty the freedom to select any possible meeting pattern, but it certainly more than possible to add hybrid courses to our existing portfolio.

If we do, we’ll be doing right by our students. And isn’t that the goal?

That said, I want to plead with everyone making this transition to lighten up on your students and to lighten up on yourselves. I am hearing report after report of teachers stressed out beyond belief about how to manage the shift into an online mode that they have little to no familiarity with. One stress management tool they can apply right away is to drop one-third of the content, assessments, and planned activities like group discussions or whatever out of their courses. This is one semester. If students don’t learn all they would have learned in a normal semester, so what? We’ll get them where they need to be. But we don’t need to get them there right now, this minute. Give yourself a break and do less.

More importantly, though, we all have an obligation to care for our students, because they too are stressed out beyond belief. Do not keep giving them timed tests or quizzes that just amp up their stress levels. Do not assign the same amount of work you normally do — they, like you, just can’t do the same amount. Don’t try to force them to interact with one another in the same ways they would if they were in a classroom together. Online interactions just take longer to set up, to manage, and to process. Those interactions can wait.

One of my students told me the other day that he just can’t keep up in class right now. Why? Because he lost his job, he’s in a state with tight lock down rules, and the local unemployment office is putting people on hold for 2-3 hours. He’s worried about making rent and having money to buy food. Class? Not even in the top 10 of his issues right now.

A colleague told me that one of their students isn’t getting the work done in class because since the crisis began the student has had to move two times. That’s two times in a month.

A student of mine who teaches at an elite university wrote me yesterday to say that as many as one-third of his students have just vaporized. They aren’t responding to emails, they haven’t checked in online. They’re just gone.

A neighbor told me that her niece had to drop out of college because she lives in a rural area of Virginia where there is no access to the Internet except at college, the local public library, and McDonalds, all of which are now off limits to her. When she asked her professors if there was a way she could do the work for their courses without the Internet, they all told her no.

And guess what? That loan she took out for this semester is still going to be due. Do you think the stress of knowing that she’s out all that money and she is a semester behind and she’s not sure if her friends and family are going to die because they live in a rural area where the nearest hospital is more than 40 miles away is something she’s managing well right now?

Another colleague told me that one of her students called her the other day to say that she just can’t write the essay due in class because she’s lost her child care and is also now caring for her grandmother who had to move in with them.

Our students have lives that are so much more complicated than we’ve understood because we’ve had the luxury of not knowing. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We have to understand that they are feeling the stresses of this moment in exactly the same ways that we are and that more and more of them are falling apart under the workloads we’re assigning.

If there was ever a time to lighten up on our students (and ourselves), I’d say that April 2020 was that time.

Seriously. Lighten up.

It’s really hard to know what to do to make things better when your main focus is keeping things and yourself stable, safe, and sane.

Around the world, foundations of every shape, size, and mission are in a similar “figuring it out” moment. What should they do with their funds at this time of international public health crisis? How can they redeploy those funds to make the biggest difference? Should they ditch years of carefully thought out investment and just give their money to research? To first responders? To buying equipment for hospitals? To supporting those in need in their communities?

As a foundation trustee and the chair of our foundation’s strategy and program committee I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues over the past two weeks. Our foundation is pretty new, only 10 years old, but we’ve been doing some very good work and have played a central role in building the local ecosystem of philanthropy in Romania.

And now that ecosystem is facing ruin. Rightfully and understandably, almost every donor in Romania is directing their support to medical supplies, food aid, and other forms of relief in a country where the infection rate is growing rapidly. And the great news is that businesses and individuals are stepping up to make very large donations, many of them being channeled through the network of community foundations we helped to build. Because so much money is already flowing to the most basic needs in the country, we have decided that our best course is to ensure that our network of partners emerges from this crisis whole and still able to do the vital work they have been doing over the past seven or eight years.

To help make sure that happens, we’re working with them to redeploy project-based funding to essential things like paying staff and paying rents rather than delivering on promised projects. We’re relaxing our expectations about deliverables from existing grants and we’re making sure they get what they need so that three, six, or how ever many months from now they emerge from this moment of crisis still able to do their work in rural economic development, K-12 education, ecotourism, entrepreneurship education, and community philanthropy. All of these programs are essential to the future of the communities where our partners work and without those small-scale social enterprises, those communities, many of them very poor, will be left without supporters who can help them recover from the crisis.

Do we know that this is the best of all possible choices? No. Of course we don’t, because right now no one knows what is the best thing to do. But we do believe that our partners have a critical role to play in the recovery efforts in Romania and so we have chosen to make sure they are still there, still working, and still whole enough to do that critical work. We might change our mind in a month, or three months, because none of us knows how bad it’s going to get before it gets better. But for now, we have a plan that we believe will position our partners to do what needs to be done when the corner is turned and we can all start thinking about recovery rather than survival.

I can’t take credit for this philosophy of management. I stole it from the principal of a K-4 school outside of Siem Reap, Cambodia (pictured here) where I was doing some volunteer work in 2007. The principal of that school told me that his philosophy was that his students and teachers would be safe, healthy, and could then teach and learn as they needed. That struck me as a good philosophy and I’ve followed it every since.

Who knew that my values would be so severely tested in my first year in the position? Right before the semester started we all received text messages telling us there was an active shooter on campus and that we should flee, hide, or fight. No sooner had we herded ourselves into our offices and under our desks than we got the all clear. Oh, so sorry. The vendor who manages our warning system sent that message in error. It was super annoying, but at least everyone was safe.

And now this. Covid-19. We’ve shifted to remote work, staying in touch as best we can via videoconference, project management platforms, email, text and social media. Trying to recreate the generative environment of our dev table and our project meetings is going to prove to be a major challenge. For all our digitality, we do our best work when we are sitting close together and talking. But at least, for now, we’re all healthy.

For each of us, times like these are a test. A test of what we value. A test of what we believe. A test of our coping skills. A test of the systems we’ve created to support our people and our work. And a test of who we are. The digital humanities community, a community I’ve been a proud member of since the late 1990s, is one of the most vibrant, most resilient communities I’ve ever been privileged to be part of. We’ll make it through this crisis and we’ll learn some things about our colleagues, ourselves, our systems, and our community that we didn’t know before. Most of those things will be good. Some won’t.

But in the end, if we’re safe and healthy, the opportunities to do interesting work will still be there.

Given that we aren’t going to convince these businesses to shut down and some number of our students will avail themselves of the opportunity to buy a paper for $50 or $100, what should faculty members do?

First, it seems to me, we have to own up to the fact that we are complicit in the entire enterprise. There are ways to assign writing in our courses that are not easily susceptible to this kind of cheating, but those ways are frankly much more difficult (for us) than simply assigning a five page paper on Topic X, due on Date Y. A typical college student in the U.S. is taking 12-15 credits, is working 20-25 hours per week, and likely has child care or other family responsibilities. The typical student is not the over-privileged 19 year-old partying their way through college. But whichever avatar of student you prefer, the generic paper assignment–which I am just as guilty as anyone else of including in my syllabi–can come across as pointless, a waste of time, or simply too stressful.

And thus, students are tempted. How many cross the line and use one of these essay mills? The story from the BBC cited above argues that the number is very small. But a recent poll of my students–I asked them how many knew someone who had used such a service and how many knew someone who had considered using such a service–indicates that the BBC may be underestimating. About 10 percent of my students said they knew of someone who had used such a service–but primarily in high school–and closer to 20 percent said they knew someone who had considered it. These results are not scientifically generated, but they are worrying.

What then should faculty members do when one of the important learning outcomes in our programs is that our students will emerge as better writers than they were when they arrived on campus?

I would suggest that we have to re-think “writing” altogether. Once upon a time, a five-page or ten-page or two-page essay was something we understood and believed had pedagogical value. Whether such essays were/are the best way to teach writing is another matter entirely, but is the case that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of faculty assign such essays every semester. Given that essay mills are going to become more ubiquitous rather than less and the five or ten-page essay fits their business model like a glove, I propose that we need to throw in the towel and teach differently.

What would that look like? One model is what I have been doing in my research methods course. Rather than asking students to write a ten-page research essay, I have them write the first two pages of a 25 page essay over and over and over until they get it right. This kind of writing is iterative, hard, and frustrating for students, but by the end of the exercise, they have a great start for a long paper and so know how to begin such a work.

But I can’t do that! My classes have 45-65 students in them (or whatever large number that makes iterative writing/grading unworkable). I teach such a class most semesters and this semester is the last time I will include five-page essays as a required element in the course. Instead, I will be giving students options to choose during the first two weeks of the semester:

1. A writing intensive version of the class in which they write essays, all of which require iterative writing and in-office meetings about their writing;
2. A testing intensive version of the class in which their grade is based entirely on exams.

This way, students who simply want an introduction to the subject (more than half of my students most semesters) can punt on the writing and just take some tests. Students who want to use the class both as an introduction to the subject and an opportunity to improve their writing can choose Option 1, but know in advance that they are in for some serious engagement around their writing skills. Students in my digital humanities classes are making things, not writing essays, so I have no worries in those classes.

Will this approach be fool proof? Of course not. Will it help to reduce the potential use of essay mills? Maybe. Will I be happier because I won’t need to suspect them of buying papers? Definitely.

North America is lousy with ghost trails. Most of us walk right past them without noticing, or if we do, don’t stop to think about what we just saw, why it’s there, who (or what) made it, how it might take us into a historical moment if we would just step off the main path, push aside the overhanging branches, or step through the cat briars, and push off into the woods, following the ghost trail wherever it leads us.

Maybe it’s a primordial fear of the unknown, or the Hollywood created notion that if you walk into those woods you might encounter a crazy person with an axe. Whatever the reason, too often we walk right past ghost trails and leave it to others to wonder what might be up there in the woods, around those rocks, or over that ridge line.

These days I’m spending a lot of time thinking about ghost trails, because I’ve begun work on a history of Virginia’s “Lost Appalachian Trail” — the 300 mile-long section of the Appalachian Trail that used to run from just southwest of Salem, Virginia, down through Floyd, Patrick, Carroll, Grayson, Smyth, and Washington counties. That section of the Trail, first laid out in the early 1930s, was the official route of the AT for more than 20 years, until it was abandoned by the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) in the early 1950s. The decision to abandon the route through Southern Virginia was pitched by the ATC as a protective measure, designed to get as much of the Trail’s route onto federal land in the new Jefferson National Forest as possible.

You don’t have to be much of a historian to know that simple explanations like that are rarely the whole story. It is true that the ATC sought to protect as much of the Trail as possible by moving it into National Parks and National Forests. But it is also true that the relationship between the leadership of the ATC — effectively Myron Avery — and the local trail community in Southern Virginia was never a strong or comfortable one. The weak nature of that relationship meant that it was much easier to abandon the 300 miles of trail from Salem to Galax to Damascus than it would have been to route the AT away from a section managed by a trail club with a strong leadership closely tied to the ATC in Washington.

And so, I’m chasing a 300 mile long ghost across Bent Mountain, past Meadows of Dan, through Fancy Gap, over Fisher’s Peak, down Main Street in Galax, across the New River at Fries, over Comer’s Rock, through Skulls Gap, and down the Iron Mountains to Damascus. I’ve already interviewed a 101 year-old woman who remembers going into the mountains with her father to help build the AT in 1930. I’ve pushed through the cat briars to follow a ghost trail that might be part of the old AT route near Adney Gap. I’ve had lunch in the Floyd General Store and gotten lost near Elk Creek. I’ve chatted with an antique dealer about the “courthouse murders” in Hillsville, and I’ve driven through some of the thickest fog I’ve ever seen along the crest of a mountain, hoping that the lack of guard rails won’t be a problem.

As Bill Turkel wrote in The Archive of Place back in 2008, I’m after “latent or seemingly insignificant traces” of the past, traces that, I hope, will help me find my way to some interesting conclusions about a place and a past that is all but opaque to the community of hikers, advocates, supporters, and others who care about the Appalachian Trail. At the very least, I’ll end up with some good ghost stories.

I’ve already written an obituary for Peter, so I won’t rehash what I wrote in 2013, but you can read it here. For a historian, Peter was always looking forward, so instead of revisiting his life, I’ll summarize instead what I said in the seminar. That the speakers were located in Basel (with the audience), Innsbruck, and here in Fairfax would, I think, have made Peter very happy. My task was to say something about what has happened in digital history over the past five years and to peek a bit into the future, so here’s what I said, more or less.

To begin with, I think it’s important to recognize what hasn’t changed in the past five years. The short answer is, a lot hasn’t changed, but the two big issues that we still haven’t dealt with successfully are deciding how to credit the work of digital historians in academia. Promotion committees still struggle with digital history, largely because they want to find ways to make the work we do fit into categories they already understand, like “book” or “article.” Digital history doesn’t work that way and will never fit into those categories. As long as we keep trying to fit the square peg in the round hole, we’ll be stuck where we are. The second thing that hasn’t changed is that granting agencies (generally) don’t like to fund the sustainability of digital projects. Funding new projects is great and I’m very thankful to all the funding agencies who have supported my and my colleagues’ work over the past two decades. But it remains very difficult to find funds to keep those projects updated and online.

On the good side of the ledger, I would argue that the two most positive developments of the past five years are the mushrooming amount of linked open data available to digital humanists, and the increasingly blurry boundaries between the history, library science, geography, linguistics, computer science, and other disciplines.

The more linked open data we have, and the better our tools get for working with that data, the more interesting will be the results coming from the analysis of these vast corpora of texts, images, numbers, sounds, and other forms of humanistic content. Both of the other speakers in the seminar mentioned AI and machine learning as critical to what’s happening, but call me a cautious optimist on that front. Thus far, the results I’ve seen from machine analysis of these data sets hasn’t really resulted in any big insights that have made historians sit up and say, “Wow!”. I expect that to happen one of these days, maybe soon. But right now I think the most interesting results coming from the analysis of linked open data is coming from the minds of humans rather than from machines.

I am also gratified by the blurring of those disciplinary lines I just mentioned. Geospatial humanities projects are excellent examples of that blurring, but I’m also encouraged by the growing sophistication of conversations between historians and librarians and archivists around information architecture. Digital historians and digital archaeologists are also starting to find interesting common ground. Our students will live lives that slide back and forth across and through disciplinary boundaries, so why shouldn’t we? Not long ago I had an incredibly energizing conversation with Cristina Wood about her work in data sonification. I think Peter would be very happy to see the increasing levels of collaboration across these boundaries and the entrepreneurial work graduate students like Cristina are doing.

My peek into the future included a prediction: future historians will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to preserve cultural resources around the world that are vanishing as a result of climate change — especially those that will submerge into the oceans and seas as a result of the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Digital historians are going to be called upon to help preserve these historic sites and other resources, so the time is already here when we should be preparing our students for this work.

Finally, I pointed out that the digital humanities starts to look and feel more like a discipline, a growing number of scholars are trying to draw lines around what is and what isn’t “digital humanities.” It’s only natural that they might, because it is through the setting of boundaries that we know what we are and aren’t doing. The problem, of course, is that creation of boundaries leads inevitably to “You’re doing it wrong!”

I like to think Peter Haber would have, in his gentle yet firm way, pushed back against the notion that there were right and wrong ways to do digital humanities. Fortunately, as yesterday’s seminar demonstrates, his legacy lives on through his colleagues, his students, and his family.

Last week I had the unenviable task of culling the life of my mother-in-law, aged 81. In some ways I was the perfect person for this task, because in my sister-in-law’s garage there were 32 banker’s boxes of files that needed to be sorted through in just under 72 hours, because we were relocating her from Colorado to Virginia on short notice. Who better than a historian to do the work of pulling the significant items out and saving them?

Because she was the keeper of the family history, several of those boxes were filled with scrapbooks, photographs dating back to at least 1870, documents from a relative’s Civil War service in the Army of Northern Virginia, hundreds of more recent snapshots, an edited set of letters sent home from the American campaign in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy in 1943-44, a series of photographs from my mother-in-laws years as a student at Sweet Briar College in the mid-1950s, and love letters exchanged with her second husband (to whom she was married for more than 30 years).

Plenty of the documents were easy to identity, but almost all of those easily identified were texts. The photos, not so much. Some had scrawled notes on the back, but most did not. I would ask my mother-in-law, but she has dementia and has a difficult enough time remembering me, much less who is who in a photograph that is more than 100 years old.

My wife was at least a little help. She could identify her grandfather in this photograph from his undergraduate years at the University of Virginia.  I happen to know a little bit about his life, but almost all of it in the last two decades before he died. I do know he attended UVa and went on to the Harvard Medical School. After that he returned to his native Lynchburg, Virginia, where he practiced medicine until he retired. And I can pick him out in this photograph, because he looks so much like my brother-in-law. But beyond identifying him and knowing that this was an undergraduate fraternity of some sort, I don’t have a clue about anything else in the image.

And so I’m left to cull her life down to one banker’s box of texts and images, most of them identified, but many not. The rest, well, they’ve entered the dustbin of history. In the end I’m left wondering if it is easier or more difficult to cull the record of someone’s life when you are a historian.

Today, anyway, it feels a lot more difficult.

That’s what it says on page five of George Mason University’s Strategic Plan. As one of the authors of that document back in 2014, I’m always happy when this simple sentence is deployed to explain a new policy or rule. And I’m equally unhappy when we, too often in my view, make rules and policies that are grounded in the revenue needs of our various academic units rather than what’s good for our students.

Because the internal contest for revenue that drives so much of our decision making makes me crazy, it’s useful to be reminded, by students, that they come first. They are under such pressure and face so many problems–excessive debt, an unpredictable job market, political disunity at home, a looming climate disaster everywhere. We owe them more than just an excellent course. What we do as educators transcends the syllabus.

And it’s good to be reminded, by students, that it’s not all about me.

Those who know me know that I’m a person of very strong political opinions and that I’m very passionate, and sometimes even a little intolerant (if I’m honest), on certain issues relating to individual rights, climate change, and the twinned issues of equity in access, not just in higher education, but in our society generally.

My students will tell you, I hope, that I also keep all of those opinions to myself in the classroom. This is an issue with lots of strong feelings on both sides — professors shouldn’t be afraid to express their political and social views in class/professors should keep those views to themselves. I get why some of my colleagues bring their views into the classroom and I don’t condemn them for that. I just don’t teach that way. That’s just me.

But I still have those strong opinions and the events of the past 12 months have just made me even more committed to what I believe.

When one of my former students came to see me back in late November to ask for letters of recommendation for graduate school, I asked the obvious question: “What have you been doing since you graduated two years ago?” As it turns out, he had been very engaged in the recent election, working for a congressional candidate who I had really, really hoped would lose (she didn’t). A part of me wanted to scream, “How could you possibly work for someone like her?”

Fortunately, I remembered, it’s not all about me.

So, I wrote him glowing letters — he was, after all, an excellent student and a nice person — and I’m happy to say he was admitted to several excellent graduate programs.

Just today I received a phone call from the executive director of a local NGO seeking a reference on a former student — one of my favorite students of the past several years. She began the call by explaining the mission of her organization and it was clear immediately that their goals and beliefs are antithetical to mine. Really antithetical. A part of me wanted to call my student right away and scream, “How could you possibly work for such an organization?”

Fortunately, I remembered, it’s not all about me.

So, I gave her the excellent recommendation she deserved — she is, after all, a wonderful person and was one of the best students I’ve taught in the past several years. I suspect, given the tenor of the call, that she’s their first choice and I hope she gets the job.

These two students have done exactly what we hope our students will do. Get a good education, and then apply what they’ve learned to launch themselves onto career paths that they’ve chosen for themselves. In short, the system worked. I’m proud of them both, even if I might wish they had political or social views aligned with mine.

As we head into tomorrow’s change of presidential administrations, I’m going to try hard to remember the lessons I’ve learned from these students, namely, that just because I disagree with your position on issues I care passionately about, the odds are really good that you are a fine person, doing the right thing according to your own lights. We just don’t agree.

If we can all remember that it’s about all of us, then maybe, just maybe, it won’t be quite as I fear it will be. And so, on his last day in office, I’ll let President Obama have the last word:

“Sometimes I get mad and frustrated like everybody else does, but at my core, I think weâ€re going to be OK.”