Human life is full of typos and other errors. For instance, many people prefer to “win” rather than to be better people. Others thought they read “wine.”
But what are we here for if not to melt into mirth, love, and learning?
Presidents in my lifetime – Harry, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Dick, Jerry, Jimmy, Ronnie, Poppy, Billary, W., Barack, Donald and Joe – did their best. But we elected the worst. We didn’t mean to, we were simply left with a choice between two well-knowns and some outliers.
We crave a leader who will talk to the press, waltz at a State Dinner, employ healers to explore our health, tax fairly, stop killing anything for money, and at least try to talk without a teleprompter. Where is that person?
In 1948, Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey, but a Progressive and a Prohibitionist also ran. Since then, George Wallace, Benjamin Spock, Eugene McCarthy, Lester Maddox, Gary Hart, Pat Schroeder, John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and others have offered something fresh to think about. In the 2020 election, there were 17 candidates (including Kanye West and Jesse Ventura) who got at least 2000 votes each.
Are the winners the smartest and the losers the limpest? Not necessarily. It feels like we are encouraging early graduation when we narrow everything down to the top two. Every single candidate says they will listen to us because we’re so important. We buy it and they don’t mean it.
Why can’t we get answers to simple questions – like how did we develop a vaccine in months that will stop a new virus of unknown origin, when we’ve been working on cancer cures for, well, at least since President William Howard Taft said in 1910 that cancer would “fail to be fatal within five years?”
Smallpox killed up to half a billion people. Covid has killed just over four million. Different timeframes and circumstances, for sure, but also graphed closely enough to map hope instead of despair.
Vaccines, as we were taught in school, prevent, not cure, disease. We still don’t have a cancer vaccine.
But we do have governments, corporations, athletes, and actors insisting that we shoot a new medicine into our bodies to prevent viral spread. If we don’t, we’re called infectors, spreaders and freeloaders.
It seems we learned that cleanliness at every level, from our water to our air to our thoughts, is a deterrent to sickness.
Thoughts might be the heftiest viral conductors of all. We have anti-vaxxers assaulting school boards, vaxxers attacking anti-vaxxers, and 12-year-olds stuck in the middle. None of that can be good for our immune systems.
Not accepting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine is different than being an anti-vaxxer, just as being cautious and aware shouldn’t imply that we’re angry and reckless.
We are listening to someone we voted for (or not) who is listening to others who might have more education, but not necessarily more intuition, than we do.
I hope everyone, vaccinated or not, trusts their decision and doesn’t let intolerance or defiance make them uppity enough to not take alert precautions.
And I wish the government would tell us the truth about aliens and what they have to offer instead of being afraid of what they’re going to take.
Or did they mean to type alienate?