My family’s camp on Sebec Lake has the typical look — sagging furniture fashionable decades ago, mismatched cutlery and dishes, faded snapshots on the walls of grinning children in swimsuits (who are now themselves grandparents).

What is not typical is the bathroom décor.

In the 1960s, my father, a lifelong Republican, was given a gag gift of a framed color photograph of LBJ, with a faux handwritten thanks for all his “friendship and help through all the years” scrawled along the bottom. Upon receipt, my father told the giver (a staunch Democrat) that he knew just where he’d put it — over the toilet at the cabin.

And so began a six-decade steady accretion of political ephemera: Goldwater posters, a pin saying “Kennedy, a Man for the ’60s,” an anti-Nixon “Impeach the Cox Sacker” sticker from 1973, a “Carter Mondale” poster — as his left-leaning children tacked their contributions on the walls, and up onto the ceiling.

Looking around the room now, I see a Reagan poster with the original use of the slogan “Let’s make America great again,” a “Bush is scary, Vote for Kerry” sticker as well as one with “Bush/ Noriega 88.” There’s a magnet of Sarah Palin with the snarky comment “Thinking gives you wrinkles” and “No CARB diet — no Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld or Bush,” and not one but two different “Impeach Bush” signs.

As I brush my teeth, I realize I cannot for the life of me recall what was the reason that there was a call to impeach George W. Bush. I actually have to Google it. A resolution was submitted in 2008 in the House, with most of the articles focused on his alleged misrepresentation of the reasons for the war in Iraq, plus domestic surveillance and botched handling of Hurricane Katrina clean-up.

As I scan the walls, I have a sense of rueful nostalgia for those earlier times when we labeled these politicians “terrible” and “a disgrace.” It’s similar to the feeling  I have when I recall that at my high school graduation in Dover-Foxcroft in 1972, our class stood and sang The Youngbloods’  “Get Together,” accompanied by two classmates on folk guitar:

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now

How little we foresaw what was to come. Today I would gladly welcome either Bush back in the White House without much of a second thought.

The tsunami of the second Trump presidency has inundated us, pushing us below the waves, then we bob up to the surface for a brief inhalation, before being shoved back down again and again, with the next affront. I am just treading water, swiveling around in place; trying to see in which direction the beach lies takes all my concentration.

Bumper stickers and pins as political protest are pretty much a thing of the past. People use TikTok and X and the zillions of other platforms to register their opinions electronically and mostly converse with others in their same silos.

There is not enough room on any car bumper to place all stickers I’d need to comment on the myriad demoralizing issues that the president, Congress and Supreme Court have imposed on us these past six months.

Sadly, protest bumper stickers seem as quaint and historical as the furnishings of this camp or lyrics imploring us to “all get together and try to love one another right now.”