It is perhaps of no surprise to anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past two years, but we are living in extraordinary times. Everyday the headlines crow with new bits of unprecedented news: a president directly criticizing his successor, a resistance within an administration, and startling rumors of incompetence. Political pundit's love to gripe and grimace at all of these events and claim that they are giving rise to dangerous examples for the future, what they fail to realize is that we are living in unprecedented times and that in such times the regular business and happenings of politics no longer apply and only the extreme and unusual have any chance of setting things to rights.

I think we have all on some level had some awareness of the situation, but it did not fully take root for me until a few short months ago when I happened to watch a comedy special. The special in question was "The Comeback Kid" on Netflix featuring John Mulaney, a former SNL writer. If you haven't seen the special, go watch it. It's really good. In the special, one of the sketches he did was comparing Trump's presidency to a horse in a hospital; Trump is the horse and the hospital is the presidency. Something totally unexpected and filled with uncertainty. That was his great insight; the best metaphor for our current reality is a horse is stuck in a hospital. No one knows how it got there, what's its doing, or even how to get it out; and that is driving us crazy as we are constantly updated about what the horse is doing. We try to bring in experts to help us come to grips with what's going on, but the most they can tell is they saw a bird in an airport once, as if that is helpful. In the process, we just become even more worried and confused.

All joking aside, we are living in a truly unprecedented moment politically in this country where the normal rules of behavior and action no longer apply and things that would have been unthinkable even two years ago are suddenly with us every day. Experts try to come out and reassure us and draw parallels to the past, but they are just grasping at straws at best. Even the closest parallel to our time, Nixon, is still leagues different than what is going on right now. We are going through the national equivalent of a child finding out that their parents and every other adult they know don't actually have any idea what they are doing. It's kind of a scary thing to realize, and the constant news cycle that we are always plugged into does not help things.

I do believe that things will turn out all right in the end. That many of the things being done today are done more out a feeling of emergency than any intent to alter the future, those actions that are will be so tainted with the miasma of this administration that they will not long endure after it. That being said, we are not yet finished with unprecedented actions and I fear the worst is yet to come as the horse is not yet out of the hospital, and it shall take a great effort to remove him.