Things I Know: The (Election) Year of Living Dangerously

I’ve probably written about 5,000 words into this post’s editing screen since I began fussing with it over a month ago. And I’ve deleted about that many words, and started over, and over, and over…

Here’s the essence, though, presented at last as a bulleted list of Things I Know (or Imagine I Do):

• Florida’s Presidential primary election is now less than a week just a day away, on Tuesday 3/15/2016. And no, I don’t know for whom I’m voting yet. I (early-)voted a couple days ago; obviously, I know for whom I voted, but it makes no difference to this post.
• That said, it won’t be wasn’t for a Republican.
• About the Democratic candidates:
  • It’s about damned time we had an opportunity to vote (or not to vote, as the case may be) for Hillary Clinton. If anybody has earned a seat in the party’s saddle, it’s her.
  • I sorta-kinda believe the conventional wisdom about the Clinton-vs.-Sanders choice: it presents us with a referendum on the world we have, vs. the world we want (or the world we might have, etc.).
• About the state of the country and the world:
  • We have got a hell of a lot of stuff pressing in on us from all sides in 2016: climate change, economic inequalities, famine/plague/drought conditions, wars and more wars, religious extremism, all but the collapse of the public education and infrastructure systems, ignorance and superstition, criminal-justice nightmares, a growing dependence on energy just as energy resources are disappearing, the weight of history…
  • Solving all — solving any — of the crises cataloged in that previous bullet will require one thing (besides willpower, of course): money.
• About the Democratic candidates in light of the state of the country and world:
  • Clinton can probably tackle any or all of it — and move us (maybe) a quarter-inch towards solutions. It may take her two terms to do it, but she can do that much.
  • Sanders is a complete cipher — an unknown along almost every dimension, at least in terms of executive skills.
  • And yet:
    • Everything is broken. It’s not just because of technology; it’s because of the urgency of the problems with which “business as usual” politics has presented us.
    • That — everything is broken — is the message voters are sending the two parties this year, and neither party is listening.
    • Much though I admire Clinton, I have great, great, nearly insurmountable difficulty imagining her prepared to upset “business as usual” politics. She’s a product of those politics, after all.
  • Remember Sarah Palin asking us, mockingly, “How’d that hopey-changey thing work out for ya?” — after hope and change had been Obama’s watchwords? It didn’t work out very well at all, in fact… because hope and change are the first victims of business-as-usual.
  • President Obama seemed, at first, to be the start of something big. Actually, I think, he was a fitting conclusion to all the something-little that had preceded him.
  • Boy — both parties are going to be in a shambles if they don’t wake the heck up between now and November (and afterwards, when it comes to actual, y’know, governing).

—

About that urgency…

2016 feels very different than other Presidential-election years to me and, I think, to many others on both the left and the right. I’ve written at RAMH before about Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, and maybe the song needs to be to be trotted out again. This time around, I’d like to draw attention particularly to the opening stanza:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

I cannot get these lyrics out of my head this year. I don’t think it’s about climate change, of course (nobody was talking about climate change at that point in the 1960s). While I recognize the song’s genesis — again, at that point in history — I don’t think it really serves anymore as an intergenerational warning. No, I think there’s an undercurrent in 2016 (in this state and region, in the country as a whole, in the hemisphere and the world at large): an undercurrent of panic. That first stanza isn’t a prescriptive, you-better-wake-up admonition; it’s a descriptive prophecy.

(I use the word “prophecy” advisedly, and only because the song was written so long ago. If it had been written last week, I’d have called it a “report.”)

We should be in a state of panic. We — the collective “we,” the global one — are in so much trouble right now, on all fronts, and all brought on by human activity and sustained by inactivity: climate; economic inequality (along racial, gender, class, country-of-origin, and pretty much any other lines you want to draw); wars — and the threats of wars — across and within international boundaries; famine, plague, and drought; ignorance and superstition… and a chronic inability to do anything about any of it, except to distract ourselves via entertainment media and the Internet. (Those, at least, are two things we do brilliantly well.)

And the more I think about all this, the more convinced I am that all those problems come down to one thing, one central issue: money.

Listen, I’m not a pie-in-the-sky “let’s burn and melt down all the currency in the world” or “let’s return to a barter economy” nutjob. (I sometimes think we might be better off now if we’d never gone down the money road in the first place, but that horse has been out of the stable way too long to be whistled back in.)

But damn — if we can solve or at least dilute the money problem, maybe we’ve at least got a chance to do so for all the consequent difficulties, too. As long as there are big and easy profits to be made in problems, no solutions will ever come along.

I’ll tell you what I am very confident about, what I do think I know: Sanders is doing his damnedest to keep the focus where it must be, if we’re to resolve any of the crises facing us. We’ll never solve the war problem, as long as so much money is at stake in the arms trade; we’ll never be educated (if still not always smart) without money brought to education from somewhere; our roads will continue turning to gravel and our water and sky to poison as long as we don’t have money for them; and as long as most of the wealth of the nation is locked up in (a) the acquisition of more wealth by fewer people and (b) internationally protected enterprises (banks, global conglomerates, currency trading, and so on).

In debates, Clinton sometimes falls back on an easy gibe. She says, for instance, “This isn’t a one-issue job!”

Frustratingly, she is right about that. A President needs to focus attention on many things, some all at once and some one at a time. It’s a complicated world.

But goddammit, she is wrong if she’s implying that a President must prioritize a whole basketful of issues equally, or can simply pick-and-choose an issue du jour. Especially, she is wrong if she’s implying that the economy isn’t actively fueling all the other fires to be fought.

If we can’t solve the money problem, we can’t do a thing worth doing. It’s too late for halfway, incremental change. We have to do the one thing, and we have to do it at least halfway right, and we have to do it as soon as possible.