I didn’t watch the debate. I’ve seen enough and heard enough lies and fears. But reading all the comments about it reminds me of The Old Man and The Sea.
Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899. The Old Man and the Sea was his last novel, published in 1952. Hemingway killed himself shortly after due to depression over painful injuries. Hemingway wrote in a plain, simple style, burnished by using a telegraph. In his final novel, an old fisherman serves as a Christlike figure as he captures a giant marlin alone and attempts to take it to his village. As he goes through the usual novelishous trials and tribulations, the magnificent fish is picked to bits by sharks. No one recognizes the Old Man’s accomplishment except for a young man who vows to help in him the future.
One thing I like about Biden, who I didn’t expect to like much, is that he remembers unfinished business. Sometimes this seems small, such as banning BVO, a toxin, a thyroid poison among other things, which has been around for the past 100 years and should have been removed from our food and beverages years ago.This seems small but you are more likely to have encountered and been harmed by this stuff than a scary person that the Right is always trying to warn you about.
In fact, thanks to the conservative court’s weakening of the Chevron Ruling, we now can have judges making decisions about what is poisoning us instead of scientists. This ruling will roll back auto safety protections and drug safety as well. In fact, any specialized regulation, based on expertise, was covered by the Chevron ruling, including banking laws. Now, that’s gone. Our safety regulations have been picked apart by sharks. I think he needs to appoint a few new judges asap but he’s too respectful of process.
Biden has done a better job than any Republican president in getting ahead of the next pandemic. Despite trying to terrorize us with fear of other people, presidents such as Trump and Reagan were notoriously slow in acting on AIDS and COVID. Now their mistakes are with us forever. And perhaps they wanted it this way. Fear and chaos promote right wing authoritarianism, especially in people who have been raised to be closed off from others.
Biden is afraid of things I’m afraid of: free-market capitalism, privatization, unsafe highways, toxins—including those which can cause ED, bad weather (thanks, climate change.) When it comes to picking my poison this election year, I’m picking the guy who knows what a poison is and manages to do something about it despite his own human flaws. Like the Old Man and the Sea, a flawed novel to be sure, he can still manage to catch some big fish and the Right, ever looking out for private greed and profit, ever promoting inequality, is going to scare people about him as much as they can. We might arrive to the next shore with just a skeleton, but it’s better than drowning in a sea of poisons.
Disclaimer, I have nothing personally against sharks. Also, I stole this and have no idea who made it: