10/15/24

OH, REALLY? THERE'S A DANGEROUS ELECTION HEADING OUR WAY?

 WE’VE BEEN HAVING THE BEST WEATHER of the year in Rhode Island. Gorgeous conditions – warm, crystal clear air, drenched with sunshine, piercingly blue skies and the most gentle winds.
     And that’s a problem.
     You’d think that everything is terrific, and it will stay that way.
     It’s not okay, of course, not in North Carolina and Florida and the other states that have been devastated by hurricanes Helene and Milton, with their homicidal winds, sea surges, monsoon rains and sneak tornadoes.
     Even more treacherous is the election, now just three weeks away, which will turn the country in one of two directions: toward dictatorship or toward democracy.
     And yet, just as with the balmy weather here in Rhode Island, there is remarkable calm about this election, easily the most important in my eight-decade lifetime.
     I can’t figure out why.
     Kamala Harris promises essentially a New America, one in which the country continues to make progress toward our founding ideals and principles.
     Donald Trump will plunge the country into an authoritarian hellscape, probably one from which escape will be impossible.
     If a hurricane – or an asteroid - were threatening the entire country, not just part of it, there would be alarms and warnings aplenty.
     The airwaves and cyberspace should be filled with announcements; there’d be leaflets, billboards, sound-trucks (Do we still have those?). Volunteers would be spreading the word. We would be filling the equivalent of sandbags, towncriers would alerting us to the coming catastrophe.
     We had a terrific street fair in Newport last Saturday. Shouldn’t we instead have been taking to the streets about the election?

SURE, IF YOU ARE TUNED IN to MSNBC or political podcasts, you know what the stakes are.
     But for much of America, my sense is that  life is proceeding as usual. Yup, there’s an election. But also Halloween.  Daylight Savings Time is about to end, drastically shrinking afternoon daylight. But heck, these are things that happen every year.
     In one sense, this sense of Everything’s Fine is a tribute to the Joe Biden presidency. He promised to return the United States to normal after the chaos of the Trump years.
     And Biden delivered. The country recovered, with exceptions, from Covid; the economy surged, if imperfectly, because a market-system is unfair to the underdog; climate control got its strongest forward push, although still far too feeble. Mainly, the machinery of democracy is working as it’s supposed to.
     But the peril of a Trump return to the White House is real and possible.
     Trump makes no secret of his awful plans.
     He wants to imprison, and deport, millions of immigrants, a crusade of hatred that will have massive spillover into scapegoating other groups and eventual reversal of all civil rights.
     He wants local police to crack heads. He’ll appoint political judges and if there are openings in the Supreme Court, he’ll do what he did with his three nominees, who dispossessed women of equal medical care and created unheard of legal immunity for presidents, mocking the principal that “no one is above the law.” Trump lies and lies and lies. The election was stolen. Refugees eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. The election was stolen. Biden won’t even call governors in storm-torn states. The election was stolen.
      Last night, at a “town hall” event in Pennsylvania, after two people apparently collapsed in an overly hot hall, Trump stopped answering questions and spent the next half hour encouraging his audience to listen to his favorite songs played over the sound system, twisting and shifting to the music.
     The Washington Post’s headline:
  Trump sways and bops to music for
  39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode    
     Why wasn’t this the Post’s main headline, the banner headline on every newspaper, the lead story on every newscast, the talk of the town and the country, a  rocking would-be president off his rocker?
     Trump will change the culture, and turn it mean, ugly and strange.

 SO MUCH FOR OUR SWEET, GENTLE AUTUMN.
    A terrible storm – the most frightening in our history – is headed our way.
     Unlike natural disasters, this is ours – the voters – to control.
    We can let the storm have its way with our country, ripping apart our traditions, and degrading the lives of every one of our citizens.
    Or we can change its course, and send it  harmlessly out to sea.
     As of this moment, as a country, we don’t seem to care all that much which way the winds blow. Nice weather here in the east. Baseball playoffs underway. Football is getting started. Donald Trump is twisting and lying.
     What’s the big deal?