SEPTEMBER 17, 2024 – With just eight weeks to the Big Day, I feel like a planet with a non-symmetrical elliptical daily orbit around the sun of politics. At the apogeal phase, I’m scorched and agitated; at the perigean, I’m cool and calm. So it is with all sorts of non-political stresses and strains—anxious now; later apathetic. If this isn’t diagnosable schizophrenia, perhaps it’s a healthful state of being and evolutionary. Maybe it’s a yin-and-yan condition wherein “fight” mode is balanced by a “flight” impulse. My lopsided orbital path in my figurative model simply depicts the line connecting psychological data points along the continuum of my daily political consciousness.
Many people I know are locked in some kind of synchronous orbit around politics—each a Mercury, for instance, always in tight gravitational proximity to the ball of hot air at the center of the vast universe . . . or rather, the tiny (within that vast cosmic construct) solar system. Other folks, on the other hand, are Plutos—not really political planets at all; with minds so distant from the source of all that (ostensibly) matters, their political emotions are securely and perpetually frozen. None of the nonsense—so perceived—penetrates their coats of iced-over psychological armor.
And together—political sun and planets all—we hurtle across boundless space, locked within our galaxy of a billion shared and unique concerns outside pure politics. In the final analysis, will the shape, distance and velocity of our respective orbits affect the direction of our common fate within our common solar system?
The more I follow my personal orbit—with its radical contrast between apogee and perigee—the more I encounter heavenly objects other than the sun. Especially now, just two months out from Election Day, most media heat is generated by issues that burn so intensely on the surface of that political sun: immigration; the “economy”; “threats to democracy” (Democrats, say Republicans; Republicans, say Democrats); incendiary rhetoric (say those who themselves invoke it habitually); women’s rights (individual rights over government power, say the libs; nonsense, say the Reps: the gov’mnt has the last word when it comes to religious zealotry); immigration (still, again—but this time fixed by a large-scale gov’mnt round-up (say the states-rightists), since the wall is no longer “a thing”; and in a case of “The Rich get Richer,” how much was Taylor Swift paid for her endorsement of Harris? – NOTE: this I’m fabricating from whole cloth). And so on, except . . . our universal condition as frogs in a pot of water on the front environmental burner turned on “high” seems never to be on the front burner of our daily political concerns.
But as my orbit passes through its apogee—that is, when I read the headlines and hear snippets of cable news . . . er, cable opinion . . . I wonder, Are these really, truly the leading issues of the day or are they mostly the design of candidates, strategists and people charged with attracting “planets”?
In my skepticism I turn my view away from the sun and peer in other directions to look for the comets, the break-away asteroids—even human-made “space junk”—that could well threaten our lives and assumed order of things. An example would be a recent back story in The New York Times about the condition of a significant percentage of American . . . bridges. Most unnerving about the article wasn’t simply the age and neglect of our infrastructure but a relatively new phenomenon: the alarming effect of extreme weather (heat and hard rainfall) on bridge steel and supports. This factor now threatens to overtake the pre-existing elements of age and neglect. Moreover, the article connected this underreported condition of our bridges and . . . inflation; not to suggest that food delivery trucks having to drive extra miles to avoid compromised bridges is now a dominant driver of price increases but rather, to demonstrate how a problem in one relatively obscure sector of our complex economy can affect an issue in the forefront of political discussion; political discussion that blames the problem on “price gouging” or “tax and spend Democrats,” in each case a simplistic explanation based on kindergarten-level analysis proffered by politicians who either should know better and adopt greater intellectual integrity or don’t know any better . . . and should go back to school. Strike that and replace it with, “should go back to school and attend a class entitled, Economics 101: How the World Works—NOT How You Think it Should Work.”
Another example of a stark and threatening issue is the structure of our economy and how that concern interacts with a host of other complex matters, such as (to name three examples among the top 300) (a) the growing cost burdens of caring for an aging population at the same time Reps and Dems alike are hopping on the “immigration-is-a-problem” bandwagon (Who will staff our nursing homes, assisted living facilities and in-home care of seniors?); (b) increasing disparities of income among Americans (with a significant long-term cost, don’t kid yourself, to everyone); and (c) our policies (tariffs; military blustering; “get tough” diplomatic stances; and all the rest) toward China, Taiwan and the vulnerabilities associated with concentration of supply chains in chip-manufacturing.
The most prominent example, of course, is the one that threatens every single person on the planet: anthropogenic climate change. Yes, yes—for you skeptics, I know, I know: climate change has been a constant throughout our planet’s many-millions-of-years history[1], but never has change been as rapid as since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, most of that change having occurred within the past couple of decades. And if the skeptics will still deny the overwhelming results of exhaustive and rigorously vetted scientific research conducted and synthesized not by a mere clutch of climatologists but by legions of them, the contrarians can’t ignore the visible effects of record warm ocean temperatures, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and increase in weather extremes. Something is going on, for crying out loud, with serious tangible consequences.
That, I submit, is the central issue of our epoch; not whether inflation or immigration should be the leading focus of campaign rhetoric.
Okay, back to my binocs trained on other comets, asteroids and space junk.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I remember distinctly a conversation I had with a random golfer last summer on the local course when western wildfires burned out of control, sending an apocalyptic plume of smoke over the continent. When I mentioned offhandedly to the power-putter how smoke-filled the air was on that particular day, he revealed much about himself by saying, “Yeah, well, for millions of years fires have burned all over the place on earth.” I let it go at that. Frog in the boiling pot, I thought, telling me that the stove has always been “on.” Yeah, I wanted to say, but now, Mr. Frog, you’re in the pot.
