Washington is full of people who make self-assured pronouncements about what will happen next week or next year. We often caution against this tendency, thinking as we do of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s argument to his aides for picking the unscrupulous Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. “I’m 43 years told,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to die in office.”
Death is an unpleasant topic, and we genuinely hope Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has plenty more years to enjoy life, but her recent remark about her retirement plans strikes us as ill-advised. “I’m now 85,” she said to an audience. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so I think I have about at least five more years.”
Perhaps we can all, and not just Justice Ginsburg, learn from the biblical injunction: “Go to now, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”
