Our Times
Most Americans have never experienced times like this. Sure, we’ve been through dramatic shifts in the economy, in 1987, 2001, and 2008. And we’ve been through times of dramatic civil unrest, in the 1960’s, after Rodney King, and after Ferguson. But, in living memory, we’ve never been through a disease that has killed 117,858 in four months here in the United States, and 436,125 worldwide (as of this writing).
And those numbers don’t include the hidden thousands and maybe millions in China, Russia, and Iran. Remember when they made a big deal about hitting 100,000 dead in the US a couple of weeks ago? So much else has happened since then, but the disease keeps on killing.
It’s not as bad as the 1918 Flu Pandemic (not 1917 as President Trump keeps saying). About one half of one percent of the US population died then, the equivalent number would be sixteen million today. Hopefully modern science will be able to put a “cap in the bottle” with treatments and vaccines far before we reach that number.
Incompetence
Economic upheaval, civil disorder, and viral infection: it’s all happened in US history before. And we’ve even had Presidential leadership that seemed unable to deal with the problems. Woodrow Wilson was so focused on world leadership that he ignored the pandemic. He then was physically incapacitated by a stroke. Herbert Hoover was so dedicated to his economic philosophy that he allowed the Great Depression to reach near 25% unemployment. And Lyndon Johnson, after determining not to run for re-election, focused on the Paris Peace talks to end the Vietnam War, and failed to intervene in the combination of anti-war and civil rights unrest in 1968.
It certainly seems that this President, Mr. Trump, has failed to address our multiple crises. He has followed Wilson’s example, turning his back on the pandemic. He recognized Hoover’s flaw of economic purity, and spent trillions to prop up the stock market. But he still failed to provide for those left without employment. And, like Johnson, his focus is somewhere else, not the civil unrest that divides us today. Trump is focused on his own re-election to the exclusion of everything else.
Fanning the Flames
In American History, we’ve never had this combination of all four factors: economic collapse, pandemic, civil unrest, and Presidential incompetence, at one time. And then add one more issue, this one new in our history. We now have semi-anonymous social media that allows anyone to add gasoline on the bonfire of public discourse.
Social media lets folks speak their minds without the guardrails of facing those that they criticize. We now simply tap on the keyboard, without fear of being punched in the nose for the critical things we say. We can allow our darkest selves to have voice in the public sphere, with little concern for the consequences. In fact, we have those who seem to relish in creating discord. This is now even a weapon of nation-states: using social media to drive more wedges into the political systems of rivals. It happened to the United States in 2016: why think that Russia, China and others would pass up the upheaval of today?
The Choice
So here we are, at a true crisis in our Democracy. To paraphrase Lincoln: testing whether that nation, so divided and so stressed, can long endure. We face a choice this fall, to continue with the current incompetence, or to choose change.
For those committed to Mr. Trump because of his choice of Supreme Court Justices, I have to ask, is his failure to protect us from the pandemic worth it? Is the ongoing sacrifice of current human life the price we must pay to protect the potential human life you so value?
For those committed to Bernie Sanders’ agenda of social change: are the compromises that Joe Biden represents so terrible, that Trump is a better choice?
And for those convinced that all politicians are self-centered and corrupt: isn’t there still a choice that would make a difference in how America responds to disease, civil unrest, and economic collapse? While I do not believe Biden is corrupt, even if he is, isn’t corrupt competence better than the current corrupt disaster?
Fools?
The United States will endure, even though our differences are real, exacerbated by social media, and fueled by foreign influence. The United States has always found a way to rise above our multiple failures and flaws. Now we face an inflection point, a chance to change the direction of our nation. Biden will not take us as far as many of my more radical friends want to go, and he will go farther than my more conservative friends might like. But he represents a competence that is clearly not present in the Trump administration.
To quote Lincoln one more time:
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”.
A minority of Americans chose a non-politician actor as President of the United States in 2016, for a variety of reasons. In the past four years, and especially this year, he has proven what he can’t do.
For the sake of the United States, here’s a George Bush misquote of the song Baba O’Reily by the Who:
This November, “You can’t get fooled again”.
