Should the position ever become open, I'm not applying.  Lucifer might be a wanna be god, not aMike.  I've known that for a long time, but it came home to me yesterday when I had to play god for a while.  My nineteen year old cat, Mindy, was fading away.  A bit over a week ago, she stopped eating, save to take a few kitty treats by hand.  When her appetite did not return, I brought her to good old Dr. Burt, my veterinarian.  He did the appropriate tests, all of which returned negative, and said it was old age-she might rally but if not, I would have to "make a decision".  I made the decision yesterday.  In my god-like moment, I said goodbye to Mindy and had her put to sleep.  Euthanized.  Oh, drop the euphemisms.  I decided to have her killed.

Prescience might have made the decision easier.  If I knew of a certainty that she would be her old self the next day, I would have made a different decision.  If I knew of a certainty that she was suffering intolerably I would have made the decision with an easier mind.  But she met her end purring.

This made me meditate on the difference between humans who rather enjoy playing god, whether they admit it or not-"deciders" like George Bush and his cabal, and those who don't.  I'd put Abraham Lincoln in the second category...willing to make life and death decisions, but not enjoying it one iota.  Consider the Second Inaugural peroration:

    With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

What a peroration to an address which is a trope on the ambiguity of life.

I believe that Barack Obama doesn't like playing god, either, and that he has, so far, chosen many of his cabinet and inner advisors from men and women of somewhat similar temperament.  In the long run, this must be for the good.  But we've been ruled by god-players for eight years, and this has come to make us impatient.  We see caution and evolution of plans and programs as flailing around and wishy-washyness.  Maybe it is.  I don't know-I'm not in god-playing mode right now.  But is may be because decent men and women are faced with the kind of decision with which I was faced yesterday-and see no decision which will not cause some pain.  We hear the phrase "uncharted territory" used over and over.  I was in uncharted territory myself.  I'd never had to put down an animal before.

Obama comes to us again and again-to ask us what we're thinking, and to think with us.  So does Joe Biden.  So do the task forces he sets up.  We're not used to that, either.  He modifies his plans trying to thread the needle; producing programs which maximize the public good and minimize collateral damage.  Personally, I prefer that form of governance.  I've seen too much of its opposite in the last eight years.  I hope that public cuts him some slack-I get the feeling it will.  I also hope that the chattering classes, including the blogosphere, does the same thing.  I have less optimism on that point.


R.I.P., Mindy Cat.  I hope I did the right thing.