Month: November 2020

I’m alone this Thanksgiving Day.  Just ate a chicken roaster breast with sweet potato casserole, black-eyed peas, ice green tea and a slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream.  Already 1,000 calories, and I skipped breakfast for this feast.

Really, I don’t mind spending a holiday alone.  I’ve spent many holidays with the folks, so sitting here alone typing a blog reminds me of the days when the type of jobs I had meant sometimes I’d work a holiday.  I was OK with it.  Probably adopted a blue-collar work ethic from my dad who sometimes worked holidays for double time-and-a-half.  Wow.  I worked holidays but nothing more than regular pay.  Often an employer would give me the next day off or a day of my choosing.  That worked out fine.

I’m saying that the holidays in themselves aren’t so special to me.  They are not Holy Days, and in my upbringing even those are suspect.  Who’s creating these special dates when all of society is supposed to stop working just like that?  I like work and working and never minded being called in to do a shift on ‘holidays.’

This year I chose to stay home because of the severe warnings by the federal center for disease control.  They’re already predicting this Thanksgiving, the beginning of America’s usual extended month-long holiday season, to be the Mother of all Super Spreaders.  So given my line of work, as a school teacher, I figure I very well could be exposed despite all of us wearing masks throughout the work day.  My parents are elderly as are other relatives.  I think it unwise to go with the hip travelers’ mantra heard on the news, “You gotta live your life,” when something bad could happen.  It’s unlikely, maybe.  But I’m siding with the other American mantra, “You never know.”

So far I’ve skipped a large family reunion this summer, Labor Day visit, and now Thanksgiving and more than likely Christmas.  Not sure if I’m doing the right thing, that guilt trip also heard from travelers: What if this is the last time I ever see dear old (    ) again?  But doctors would say I’m doing the right thing avoiding the elderly, crowds, indoor family gatherings, and this new one ‘sharing air.’  On such matters as a contagious and potentially deadly illness, I defer to doctors.

That said, I’m not afraid of the new virus, figure I could be an asymptomatic carrier, very likely have already come into contact with others who actually have the virus.  I’m not worried about myself and my age group and younger plus those of us with relatively good health.  But there are all those other people out there with all kinds of chronic illnesses, many which impact the lungs and breathing.  Plus, medical experts haven’t figured out this virus yet.  Some people who’ve survived COVID-19 have chronic health problems even involving their hearts.

Perfect 2020 vision

This year has been awful for everybody around the world.  A fourth of our national workforce unable to find jobs.  A quarter of all children in this country alone going without food.  Millions of students unable to attend school or learn online.  Tens of millions of families not knowing where to turn, how to live, what to do, where to go.  It’s all due to the pandemic and mandated restrictions like closing businesses, yet only certain industries over others.

First, what we’re seeing, finally, is it’s not the virus that is the source of our problem, the lone problem shared with everyone else on the planet.  It’s how our economic systems, national and global, work and then don’t work or won’t work when a monkey wrench is thrown in.  Fine when there’s no pandemic.  Financial ruin whenever a pandemic comes along.  Pandemics occur, ushering in mega health crises.  What shouldn’t happen is food, shelter, education and healthcare are removed along with jobs and income, especially during a relatively short cycle of a year or two.

The vaccine can’t arrive soon enough.  Untested, still millions will roll up their sleeves for a shot, including me.  I see it as my duty in this unprecedented time.  Besides, wearing a face mask fogs my glasses.  I literally cannot see most of the time.  I’m walking through this era virtually blind and like everyone else have lost patience.

We just want our old lives back: when we didn’t have to think twice about hugging one another, visiting family for holidays and any reason, traveling, shaking hands, making a personal appearance because it leaves a lasting emotional impression lacking from a letter, photograph, email, phone call or online chat. But when we do live past this terrible time in our collective history, we best start contemplating how to take care of each other regardless of hardship.  The year 2020 has shown us the things we miss when they’re taken away and our very human reactions, from petty to selfish, angry to depressed.  By now we should be seeing the light at the end of the darkness. It’s visible to anyone who wants to see it. Whether you believe or not, the dawn of a new era awaits us.

Someone asked if I were happy Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020.  Joe Biden finally had been declared the winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, ousting President Donald Trump.  Jubilant would describe my high emotions.  Joyfully overwhelmed.  Ecstatic maybe.  Definitely tears of joy flowed as I watched live coverage and saw tens of millions of Americans equally elated that Biden had won the presidency.  Our mutual gleeful satisfaction also was realizing the past four years of a political, societal, emotional and spiritual downward spiral into the darkest abyss of fringe America had been halted.

But only by a point or two here and there state by state.  We won’t forget it was a very tight race.  Winner takes all in our Electoral College patchwork to name the U.S. President state by state.  Since 2000 I’ve seen the Electoral College work against the popular vote twice and radically support the old-boy institution done away with.  Any Republicans with me now?

To think that during election night, as it seemed Trump had won yet again, with small states blue and big states red including Texas, I’d given up and wept pitifully for my once-great nation: the envy of the world, the best country on earth, the fruitful land with basically good decent people with heritage from all over the world, the very terrain from sea to sea on which God shed His grace.  See, I’m so used to being the only Democrat in the house, in public places and spaces, at various employment, among friends and within my own family for the most part.  I had been brainwashed into giving up on a Democrat winning the presidency in 2020.  But by bedtime, I heard the Great Old Man (and I call President-Elect Joe Biden that as a term of endearment) tell us in his calm familiar coach’s voice to be patient.  He hadn’t given up on the election, the process, democracy or more importantly the American people.  It didn’t matter how small his campaign rallies were this year during the pandemic when we’re urged to be extra-extra cautious and avoid crowds of ten or more especially strangers no matter how deeply bonded politically.

By the end of the week, I had no fingernails.  How could Joe Biden remain so calm?  Age?  Wisdom?  Decades of political experience?  Yes, yes, and yes! 

Day by day throughout the week, the news trickling in was good for Biden—not so much for Trump who pressed, depending on the state, to stop the count or to count every single vote.  Wha?  As of this writing, he has yet to concede the loss while Biden has moved on in the work of healing our nation’s deep divisions, emotional wounds and radically opposing viewpoints within the family unit, a lot egged on by social media.  If anyone can do it, a Democrat like Joe Biden can.  He’s always been a moderate, never been radical, always worked across the aisle.  He’s fair and most of all listens … to everyone.  He’s methodical and plans.  In the presidential campaign of his life, he made very few mistakes.  Way to go Joe!

The Circle Game    

And now my blog writing has come full circle.  I began this blog of political humor and social commentary in the winter of 2016 right after Trump was elected president, specifically because Trump was going to be our U.S. President.  I clearly saw he was reckless and dangerous for the country and the world.  Four painfully long, exhausting, extremely difficult and cRaZy years later, Trump’s on his way out.

He lost his bid for re-election to Joe Biden, the Vice President of President Barack Obama and long-time Democratic legislator who ran for president a couple of times himself: a reasonable and personable guy, non-leftist, non-radical, non-billionaire, non-braggart, with working class roots, a regular Joe whose childhood was spent in Pennsylvania and later Delaware.  Biden says everyone knows his story.  He was a lawyer who at a young age was elected to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s then suddenly lost his wife and little girl in a car crash that also left his two injured sons in the hospital.  His intention was to bow out and wrap his life around his boys.  But the old men of the U.S. Senate came to a grief-stricken Biden and convinced the young man the best thing for him to do was to get to work.  He was obligated to the voters, the people who elected him.  He didn’t want to go.  His heart wasn’t in it.  He has spoken candidly about that time as a widower raising two little boys alone, saying the unspeakable: At the time, he wanted to die, too.  But his sons needed him, and for whatever reason, he took the advice of old men who coaxed him to go to work.

Biden was the type of Washington, D.C., legislator who took the train every day, a 90-minute ride to and from his home in Delaware.  In a couple of years, he remarried and was blessed with another daughter.  His bids for U.S. President never gained traction.  But then Barack Obama picked him to be his running mate.  Biden had the job for eight years, riding the train to and from work every day.  His son Beau, a war veteran and elected official himself, always wanted his dad to run for president, telling his father he would be a great president.  But Beau also fought terminal cancer.  His death in 2015 took the breath out of his father.  It was too much tragedy for one lifetime, more than a person could bear.

I was surprised when in 2020 old man Joe Biden tossed his hat into the ring for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Given his age, it seemed a bad idea, a last-minute shot, like he needed something to do.  He wasn’t good debating a new generation of energized and diverse Democrats.  Then he spoke nostalgically about working with racists legislators in the 1970s to get legislation passed that would benefit the nation.  When candidate Kamala Harris countered with her childhood as a bussed elementary student due to racist policies, Biden closed his eyes for a moment.  I knew he regretted coming across as cavalier and that he was not a bigot or racist, but only people a lot older would know that about him.  I also thought, “Wouldn’t it be something if he gets the candidacy and chooses Harris as his running mate?”

And that’s exactly what happened.

Life.  It changes fast.  It changes slow.  Joe Biden would even say painfully slow sometimes.

My best friend was from Wilmington, DE, and she always spoke highly of Joe Biden.  In the 1970s before moving to Texas, she worked his campaigns, said she knew him well, assured he was just a regular guy and would make a great president.  No doubt in her mind.  I wasn’t so sure as we discussed politics back when the Democrat contenders included Bill Clinton and Al Gore.  I wanted Gore.  I always wanted Gore.

Light at the end of the darkness

Lots of lessons these past four years with a president like Trump.  I never bought his sincerity as President.  Seemed phony from the get-go.  Yet he won.  Half of America made sure of it in 2016.  Through the years not only have Republicans supported his every whim, they don’t even call themselves Republicans anymore.  They are Trumpers.  Their political philosophy is Trumpism.

It’s frightening how close the election was now and in 2016.  Historic voting numbers this time around both for Democrats and Republicans, I mean Trumpers, but still practically 50/50.  One side wants the other side gone.  One side will work with the other side to get things done.  How can government, a democratic government, operate like this?

Diplomacy is how a democratic government gets things done.  Biden is perhaps our most consummate diplomat, learning it from the old men of the U.S. Senate whether D’s or R’s and then eight years as VP hobnobbing with leaders around the world.  Diplomacy is how we restore our nation’s divides.  The art of diplomacy is how the U.S. will restore our rightful place as world leader. 

The business of government is messy and ugly, nothing really beautiful other than the rare occasion when a moment brings warring factions together to a peaceful end and, come on now, compromise.  So we find politicians are necessary to get things done.  Bitching and moaning and constantly complaining and yelling haven’t gotten a damn thing done in our country.  It’s just loud anger.  Like it’s always been in America, half the country waited for the next election to see if their guy (and someday gal) would win and the tide would turn favorably to their way of thinking.  My half waited.  Oh, we exercised our free speech to call out horse feathers when we saw it and balderdash when we heard it.

Americans have lost faith in diplomacy since 9/11.  September 2001 was a long time ago.  The two subsequent wars are over.  The need to bully the world is over.  The chip on our shoulder has been knocked off by Russia and China who have shown us the harm they can do.

We have become our own worst enemy.  In losing the election, Trump has no one to blame but himself.  Biden is proof calm heads prevail.  For whatever reason, America had to go through a leaderless era.  With our well-known stubborn tendencies, in 2016 Americans had to blow up life as we knew it and choose the wildest card, someone who would rule as if people were expendable machines, little people living little lives with no hope for the future and certainly no help from government ruling with a cruel iron fist.  Darkness will make you see the light. Sometimes we have to walk through darkness to appreciate what we once had and count our blessings present and future.  Joe Biden knows this well.