|
|
The Final Hour and Why We Should Care
I freely admit that from the moment Kamala Harris entered the
election, I wanted to do whatever I could to urge people to vote: to
elect her President, to defeat Donald Trump and the GOP plans for
the country, to defeat Project2025’s plans for the country, and to
save democracy as we have known it all our lives. So during the past
months I’ve written postcards in support of Sherrod Brown of Ohio,
I’ve written letters to voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio through Vote
Forward, I’ve given money to campaigns, and I’ve written these
essays. I’ve sent texts, and I’ve posted on social media.
And now, here we are, teetering on the precipice with nearly
everything hanging in the balance, particularly those things that
made this country a haven for people like my grandparents seeking a
better life.
Americans have long had a fascination with celebrity. When
celebrities run for political office, it often seems as if the only
qualification necessary to gain votes is their fame.
California—where I grew up—is especially vulnerable to the
celebrity-as-qualified-governmental-official syndrome. This gave us
song-and-dance man George Murphy as Senator, Shirley Temple as
member of Congress, Clint Eastwood as mayor of Carmel, Sono Bono as
mayor of Palm Springs and member of Congress, Arnold Schwarzenegger
as governor, and Ronald Reagan, first as governor for two terms and
then as President.
Of course, a celebrity has as much right to run for office as does
anyone else. The tough bit, though, comes down to discernment. How
does the voting public discern between the celebrity who plays a
role on stage, screen, or television and the real person who exists
beneath the fame? I recall talking to a woman of my acquaintance
when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor. She’d seen him
that day in person and was flashing around a photo of him, so I
asked her if she was planning to vote for him. Her reply was, “Of
course! He’s so hot!”
It seems to me that someone’s hotness or lack thereof shouldn’t be
one of that person’s qualifying attributes for public office. Nor
should someone’s celebrity. I think that, instead, it’s a good idea
to look at the character, intelligence, and experience of the person
first and only afterwards consider what that individual may have to
offer in the area of heat.
At this point the voters have access to mounds of information that
have been offered for both of the main candidates for President and
the platforms of their parties. The voters have had countless
opportunities to read about the candidates, listen to them speak,
evaluate the answers they have given to questions, weigh their plans
for the country on issues as diverse as women’s health and solar
energy. I would hazard that a very small fraction of the voting
public is undecided at this point.
Nonetheless, as a closing note, I would like to point out some
concerns we all might want to think about in these last days.
A group called Duty to Warn has been following Donald Trump’s words
and actions since he announced he was running for President in 2015.
This group comprises both physicians and mental health
professionals, and they have noted the alterations in Mr. Trump and
the manner in which these alterations have developed and accelerated
in the last nine years. In particular, the mental health
professionals have voiced their concerns over signs of Mr. Trump’s
growing dementia. (Believe me, I know how difficult that word
dementia is for Mr. Trump’s supporters to see, not to mention to
think about.) Duty to Warn points out several signs indicative of
mental decline. These signs appear not when he has been given
questions in advance or when he is being interviewed by someone who
doesn’t point out prevarications or claims with no veracity. These
signs appear when he is in a stressful situation or one in which he
has not been scripted. The signs are:
Inability to focus on a single topic while speaking
Confusing people (Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi; his White House
physician Ronny Jackson for GOP Senator Ron Johnson; President Obama
for President Biden and vice versa)
Failure to complete sentences coherently
Losing train of thought when attempting to answer a question or make
a statement
Displaying irrationality and irritability
Phonemic paraphasia (swapping parts of words for others that sound
similar [an example would be ‘fewsher’ for ‘future’ ‘Venezuero’ for
‘Venezuela’ ‘stake mountain’ for ‘snake mountain’])
Duty to Warn also expresses concerns about Mr. Trump’s gait (during
which he sometimes drags one of his legs as he did most recently
when attempting to climb into a garbage truck) and his loss of motor
skills (such as requiring two hands to lift a bottle of water), both
of which are indicators of dementia.
I realize that to those who love and admire Donald Trump, the fact
that he might be encountering a grave health problem is difficult to
look at and/or to accept. But Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his
medical records suggests that there is something contained therein
that his staff does not want his supporters to know. Among those
supporters are the billionaires who have been pouring money into
PACs that support Trump’s campaign.
Despite all evidence that he is not a well man, the billionaires
have not backed away from him. It would be naďve to believe that
these billionaires want nothing in return. They did not get to their
position of being billionaires from a fervent sense of patriotism.
Instead, they know that, ever since the US Supreme Court declared
that corporations are people and can thus donate to political
campaigns as much as they like, their support of Trump and Vance
will not go unrewarded.
I suggest that their rewards will take many different forms,
depending upon the corporations they represent. I suggest their
rewards will come in the form of easing of environmental
protections, reluctance to file anti-trust suits against mega
corporations like Amazon, refusal to support minimum wage increases
or fairness in overtime pay, refusal to support union actions,
turning of blind eyes to discrimination in the work place, lack of
interest in addressing the vast differences in how people are taxed,
acceptance of the invasion and polluting of federal lands in the
pursuit of profits. Indeed, I suggest that the billionaires who are
supporting Mr. Trump know exactly what they want. They also know
exactly how to get it. It matters not to them that Mr. Trump may
well die in office or be found unable to serve due to mental
decline. For J. D. Vance waits in the wings and as a legal scholar
he has enough Latin to know the meaning of quid pro quo.
We the voters, however, can wrest the power away from the
billionaires who are seeking control at the highest level of
government. We the voters can finally say that, after nine years of
Donald Trump—enough is enough. Donald Trump told voters in 2015 and
2016 that “I alone can fix [the country]”. All we have to do is
reflect upon his four years in office to evaluate how well he did.
Perhaps one person “alone” can fix the country. I hope we have
reached the point of seeing that that one person is neither Donald
Trump nor J.D. Vance. And it certainly isn’t one of the billionaires
waiting in the wings for payday.
Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
October 31, 2024
|
|