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 weekjust 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 bewasn’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).
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