Will what we want to happen, happen?
Likely not, because we’re entirely too splintered, angry, fed up with each other, as well as national politics in general, and simply hungry for something that approaches normalcy.
And there was such a time.
But you’d have to take a ride back with me some forty-six years ago, and that’s a bit of a hike down memory lane. I was a Republican back then, and voted for the Great Communicator. Matter of fact, I voted for him twice before I realized I was listening to a ventriloquist, and Reagan was simply mouthing scripted lines, written for him by the Republican Party, as an actor learns to do.
But he was smooth and I was a half-century younger in those days.
To make a long story short, the decades between the end of World War Two and Ronnie were golden years for America, the best description of the ‘normalcy’ we all hunger for…and are told we can never return to. We had no debt, the millionaires gladly paid their taxes, and our industrial strength was such as the world had never seen. Immigrants all, we Americans welcomed anyone who came to us.
Doesn’t seem to matter that the dudes who tell us we can never go back are the same as those who got us where we are.
But I’m not here to beat that horse, it’s tired enough. What we have is a plutocracy of billionaires, telling us how lucky we are to have Johnny Carson re-runs and a job. There’s always Wal-Mart, Netflix and Amazon to keep us in bread and circuses, while they run off with 90% of the available cash.
Getting back to the Mid-Terms, I’ve seen too many re-runs of the movie where Donald Trump can’t possibly win, and then somehow does.
I’ve long argued that our president is not the cause of our present circumstances, but the result of a two-party system where you can’t tell the one from the other. If the electorate can’t hook up that half-century of cause and effect, they have precious little chance to willingly vote us down a different path.
If you think the president’s MAGA supporters are the dumb, the ill-informed and the ignorant, you simply haven’t been around long enough to see the entire movie. They’re angry and frightened, with plenty of reason. For the most part solidly middle class, they watched their security, and that of their children and grandchildren disappear, along with closed steel-mills, corporate farms, boarded up main streets, undelivered pensions and soaring costs of living.
No Democrats, other than Bernie Sanders and AOC, have addressed that. Not now, and not for the past fifty years.
If you were among them, who would you vote for?
When you depend upon the angry and frightened to vote for a party that abandoned them a half-century ago, you’re three cards short of a straight flush in a five-card poker game.
We’re one day away from finding out.
No matter which side you’re on, please don’t stay home.