Post 635 - August 2, 2024

We are living in a different country than we were two weeks ago. I don’t know what it’s like in our nation’s heartland, but out here on the liberal East Coast, it’s like a pall has been lifted.

The disillusioned Democrats, who were wallowing in ennui, are suddenly unified and engaged. Our new candidate, who had been kept under wraps and shrouded in shadows these last three years is now everywhere. She’s talking and we are all listening.

She’s fighting hard, yes, but she also looks like she’s living her best life. Kamala Harris is having fun.

Two weeks ago, the political discourse seemed to only be being debated by the older generations of our population. There was little, if any, engagement of the younger folks. We were a country divided.

Yesterday, Michael and I went out for dinner to a restaurant that was about half a mile away from our apartment. We decided to walk down rather than Uber. The heat was still oppressive, but it was a touch better than it had been earlier in the day.

At one intersection during a red light, a car pushed into the crosswalk rather than stopping where it should have. A group of teenagers who were heading toward us from the other side pulled themselves out of the way to avoid being hit. Looking up at the driver, one of the kids said something like, “Oh. Of course, it’s an old lady. She shouldn’t be driving.”  The woman behind the wheel couldn’t have been more than forty-five.

My father was nearly forty when I was born. By the time I was ten, he was nearly fifty. He always seemed older to me. Other kids had Dads who were twenty years younger than him. I wondered what that was like. His parents, my grandparents, always felt ancient to me.

It shouldn’t be a shock at all that the younger generation wasn’t engaged in the election – it was a battle between two ancient white men. They had no connection to it. It might well have been a head-butting contest between two old antelopes in a zoo for all it pertained to them.

What it feels like now is that Grandpa had been babysitting us, and now Mom has come back home and put everything back to rights. You can get away with murder with Grandpa, but, while you can have fun with Mom, you do not mess with her. Ever. Whether it is right or not, it now feels like somebody is solidly in charge,

A few years ago, a movie came out called Women Talking. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. The story was about exactly what the title says it was about. It was a large group of women sitting together to come to an important decision.

To make some wildly blanketing generalizations here, women don’t talk like men. Men tend to argue aggressively and combatively. In this group discussion, however, there was none of that. The women went round and round, seemingly endlessly, until they eventually reached a consensus. They discussed. They disagreed. They discussed some more. Then they decided together and acted upon their choice.

Up until now, the Democrats have been trying to counter the aggressive attacks of the far right with attacks of their own. Force has been met with force. Given the age of the two primary combatants, neither has been fully up to the task. One is just a bully, and the other, while a gentleman, doesn’t have the physical force these days to be fully effective.  it’s been hard to watch.

The far right has long been hurling alternative facts and antagonistic slurs at the left. These days, instead of tossing back the same, we are undercutting all of that with our responses. “Weird.” “Creepy.” These are words of observation, not words of battle. Under Vice President Harris, we have somewhat stepped back from the fray and, in doing so, we seem to have gotten the upper hand. At least for the moment.

The far-right appears to have no idea what to do now. The former President only knows one thing - how to attack. He doesn’t know how to discuss. It is a measure of how out to sea this new strategy has left him, that the best he can do so far is attack Kamala Harris on how she laughs.

That, and of course, by attacking her racial identification.

Appearing before a group of Black journalists, he questioned why the Vice President is suddenly identifying herself as Black when she is Indian. It was astonishing to watch this man navigate through what he must have known was going to be a hostile crowd with the same bluster he uses at his own rallies.

For the record, Vice President Harris’s mother is Indian, and her father is Black. She is the product of two different cultures. She is both Southeast Asian and Black. What she is, ultimately though, is American.

In terms of my DNA, I am about 1% Southeast Asian, myself. One of my 5^th great-grandparents was Indian or Sri Lankan or possibly both. I’m not saying that’s how I identify; I’m just saying that we are all mixtures of different cultures even me who is 99% Northern European. Trying to use somebody’s racial makeup as a weapon is simply idiotic. Like everything else the Republican candidate is doing and saying these days, all it’s going to do is boomerang back and hit him in the head.

I am still distrustful of polls. I suppose they are useful in some way, but their accuracy is always in question. Who is being polled? Who is answering? People will say one thing aloud to a person asking them a direct question, and then choose something else entirely in the privacy of their own voting booth. That said, for the first time in the race the Democrats are now polling either in a statistical dead heat or even slightly ahead of the Republicans.

As the Democrats find their voices, the Republicans are starting to lose theirs.

We are nowhere near the end of this race. Everyone keeps saying that anything can still happen, and anything still can. Nobody is winning yet; we are still competing.

Stephen Neodoroscik just helped the United States gymnastics team win the bronze medal at the Olympics. All he does is the pommel horse. In fact, to spell check his name, I googled pommel horse guy and that’s how I found him. For the rest of the competition events, he brought his teammates water and snacks and cheered them on from the side. When it came time for his event, he stepped up and gave it his all.

You don’t have to do everything to be part of a team. In fact, doing everything yourself is a sure way to ensure that your team won’t win. All any of us can do, is to do our own part and trust that our teammates will do theirs and together we will succeed.

Kamala Harris is now running for President of the United States. Freed from having to do that, President Biden is now fully concentrating on running the country. Together, what they are each doing is a medal win for the United States. There are more events to come and we each have a part to play in them.

The Republicans don’t have a team. They have a single weird and creepy guy calling all the shots and doing just as he pleases whenever he pleases. Everyone else on his team is just pivoting each time he opens his mouth. That’s not how races are won.

Watching so many of our athletes achieve so much – Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky will inspire generations of athletes for years to come – is inspiring.

If either of them met me, they would probably remember me as the old guy. I’m fine with that. People who are the same number of years older than me, as I am older than them, are over a hundred. I get it. Together, though, we are all just one group of people working toward the same thing.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We need all of us together to win this. It’s nice to see that, finally, we seem to have an excellent shot at it.