We’ll admit that sometimes we didn’t actually hear what we thought we heard. For instance, last weekend a commercial during a football game was talking about Hep C. I was so sure the announcer had said Pepsi. Imagine my surprise when he started listing side effects that included liver damage and death.
Which just means there’s uncertainty in this world, some of it perhaps attributable to hearing loss, which I prefer to think of as bad enunciation. Surely I’m not the only person of voting age who thought I heard what I didn’t hear at all.
I did hear a man call Hillary Clinton a junkyard dog recently. Well, really, if you want your stuff taken care of, wouldn’t you want a junkyard dog to do it? The man and I reached an impasse – he doesn’t like her, I do, and we both had our reasons. We still speak to each other, and I can feel a hug coming some day soon. Maybe just an air hug.
Gotta admit, though, it is hard to read letters and listen to conversations that are simply vile attacks on either of the people we are most likely to elect. There are other candidates for president, but other than Gary Johnson not being able to name a world leader he admired (Justin Trudeau? Barack Obama?) and Jill Stein wanting to fly to Columbus, Ohio, but getting on a plane to that flew to Cincinnati, we don’t know much about them. Stein, btw, recovered beautifully when she said, “I wish we had the resources of the other candidates. We’re the only candidate who operates like the American people.”
Nevertheless, voting for Johnson or Stein is a true exercise in futility no matter how anti-establishment it makes you feel.
Just because a candidate running for the highest office we have to offer is oh, so unprepared and so unimpressed with what it has taken for this small, relatively isolated republic of individual states to be the one country others look to for fairness, help, advice and just plain old adult conversation… gosh, it stings. Wouldn’t we want someone who listens, who understands others’ plight, and who takes all the insults hurled at her without getting all vampy?
When we fight back against someone by using the same language, mockery, attitude and innuendo, what makes us any better? Is listing another’s stupid mistakes a way of making us feel superior? Did you ever have someone look at you and say, “But you said in 2013…” Oh, right, probably. But that’s not what I meant.
We have essentially two people who say they want to be our president. That means they will represent us to the rest of the world. One understands other countries, their histories and cultures. The other wants to blow Iranians in little boats surrounding our “beautiful destroyers” who gesture at U.S. forces in a Yankee Go Home manner out of the water.
So, it is about temperament. And diplomacy, good manners, understanding. It is looking at the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East and not spreading fear. “We’ll let them in and they’ll blow us to small bits!” Well, sure, terrorists do that. But the people who are escaping their homeland, Aleppo, Syria, for instance, are merchants, nurses, botanists, pilots. Professional people with healthy families and spiritual values whose bank accounts were frozen right before their homes, and homeland, were bombed in a civil war that is destroying one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on this planet. And killing all the kids.
Yes, there are those who want to see us dead because we come across as greedy and thoughtless, and of course we need to do what we can to prevent that, the same as we wanted to prevent those mass murderers we’ve always had. But who knew John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer and Son of Sam weren’t altar boys? Should white men living alone be suspect?
We don’t want this to come down to whose thumb is on the scary button, but it could. What if Trump wins and annihilates civilizations so he can build luxury hotels and casinos in countries where people don’t drink alcohol? Then we decide he’s too mentally unfit to stand trial? Wouldn’t those of us who encouraged him have some responsibility?
What if Hillary announces that the United States is throwing down its weapons and will not attend any more wars?
And what if Pepsi does cause liver damage and death? Will we quit?