I’m known as a calm guy.
Where others overreact to difficulties, I under-react. Where they spin worst-case scenarios, I believe — correctly, usually; naively, at times — that nothing really terrible is going to happen.
Like Anne Frank (no relation), I believe that most people are good and that therefore, the good will prevail. Or if not prevail, muddle along.
That attitude, along with my default Anthropologist-from-Mars stance, enables me to read the news every day when so many people I know can’t bear it. It’s how I can sit through entire presidential debates when my viewing companions run shrieking from the room within the first five minutes.
Hmm, the Martian Anthropologist in me thinks, so this is how Earthlings elect their leaders. Interesting.
I tell you all this because now, less than a week from E-Day, Mr. Mellow is freaking out. What did it was a radio report about states where 2020 election deniers are overseeing the 2024 vote. Yikes!
I am now able to picture myself next Tuesday night, sweating and feeling sick to my stomach every time CNN’s Magic Wall projects another state in Trump’s win column. Worse, I can picture myself feeling that way for days, maybe weeks, as the mail-in ballots get counted and the dead heats trigger recounts and the results are challenged in court.
Back in my calm Anthropologist-from-Mars days, I read countless attempts to explain how a person with no integrity, no moral compass, no grace, no empathy, no knowledge of history and no understanding of the U.S. Constitution has nevertheless gained the fealty of half the electorate.
There’s the economic explanation: People compare the price of eggs now to the price of eggs in 2020 and blame Biden-Harris for the increase, though inflation began during the Trump administration and had more to do with COVID and supply-chain snags than the economic policies of either Trump or Biden.
There’s the entertainment explanation: Trump’s a hoot! How outrageous can the shock jock of American politics get? Just watch!
There’s the “low-information voter” explanation: Trump supporters, if they pay attention to the news at all, rely on unreliable sources and therefore believe that he’s a successful businessman who cares about America when he’s really a scammer who cares only about himself.
There’s the cynical voter explanation: The System is so hopelessly corrupt that the guy who can lie, cheat and steal his way to the top deserves our admiration rather than our scorn.
There’s the out-of-touch Democrats explanation: The Democratic response to the disappearance of good-paying jobs from small-town America – to the extent that the party pays attention to the problem at all – is to tell un- and underemployed workers to go back to school, get trained up, move elsewhere. Trump’s response to the same problem is to blame immigrants and to emptily promise to bring back those lost jobs.
I don’t blame people for not having faith in the Democratic Party. I’ll never understand why people put their faith in such an obvious con man.
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As for you, my fellow progressives who are thinking of sitting this one out or voting for Jill Stein or Cornel West because you disagree with Kamala and her party about this, that or the other: If you lived in Massachusetts or California, I’d say, go for it. You’re a Pennsylvanian? Come now. This is no time for a protest vote.
And please don’t tell me you have to vote your conscience. My conscience tells me to vote for the only person who can stop Trump from returning to the White House.
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One good thing about my pre-election jitters: Without them, I, a lifelong New York Yankees fan, would be fretting about my team’s miserable showing in the World Series. But juxtaposed with Trump winning or again refusing to accept that he lost, the Dodgers thrashing of the Yankees merits no more than a shrug: It’s just baseball.
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Nov. 7, 2020: It’s freakishly warm for early November, which is why we’re on the Atlantic City Expressway, heading for the Jersey Shore. On the radio, “This American Life” host Ira Glass sums up the state of things:
President Trump has not conceded, he’s called the vote counts fraudulent, so today we have stories of people all over the country living through this weird — I don’t know what to call it — gravityless limbo of uncertainty that we have all been floating through since Tuesday.
Since the show is about the election, we don’t immediately react when we hear something about Pennsylvania completing its vote count, making Joe Biden the next president of the United States. Then it dawns on us: The pre-recorded show has been interrupted. This is live, breaking news.
Then my daughter calls with her own breaking news: She’s pregnant with Baby No. 2.
Maybe we should go to the beach next weekend and hope for a day of comparable jubilation.
