{"id":17787,"date":"2016-03-14T17:39:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T21:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=17787"},"modified":"2016-03-14T17:39:20","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T21:39:20","slug":"things-i-know-the-election-year-of-living-dangerously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/things-i-know-the-election-year-of-living-dangerously\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Know: The (Election) Year of Living Dangerously"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"su-dropcap su-dropcap-style-light\" style=\"font-size:2em\">I<\/span>\u2019ve probably written about 5,000 words into this post&#8217;s editing screen since I began fussing with it over a month ago. And I&#8217;ve deleted about that many words, and started over, and over, and over&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the essence, though, presented at last as a bulleted list of Things I Know (or Imagine I Do):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Florida&#8217;s Presidential primary election is now <del>less than a week<\/del> just a day away, on Tuesday 3\/15\/2016. <del>And no, I don&#8217;t know for whom I&#8217;m voting yet<\/del>. I (early-)voted a couple days ago; obviously, I know for whom I voted, but it makes no difference to this post.<\/li>\n<li>That said, it <del>won&#8217;t be<\/del> wasn&#8217;t for a Republican.<\/li>\n<li>About the Democratic candidates:\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;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&#8217;s saddle, it&#8217;s her.<\/li>\n<li>I sorta-kinda believe the conventional wisdom about the Clinton-vs.-Sanders choice: it presents us with a referendum on the world we <em>have<\/em>, vs. the world we <em>want<\/em> (or the world we <em>might have<\/em>, etc.).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>About the state of the country and the world:\n<ul>\n<li>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&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Solving all &#8212; solving <em>any<\/em> &#8212; of the crises cataloged in that previous bullet will require one thing (besides willpower, of course): money.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>About the Democratic candidates <em>in light of<\/em> the state of the country and world:\n<ul>\n<li>Clinton can probably tackle any or all of it &#8212; and move us (maybe) a quarter-inch towards solutions. It may take her two terms to do it, but she can do that much.<\/li>\n<li>Sanders is a complete cipher &#8212; an unknown along almost every dimension, at least in terms of executive skills.<\/li>\n<li>And yet:\n<ul>\n<li><em>Everything is broken.<\/em> It&#8217;s not just because of technology; it&#8217;s because of the urgency of the problems with which &#8220;business as usual&#8221; politics has presented us.<\/li>\n<li>That &#8212; <em>everything is broken<\/em> &#8212; is the message voters are sending the two parties this year, and neither party is listening.<\/li>\n<li>Much though I admire Clinton, I have great, great, nearly insurmountable difficulty imagining her prepared to upset &#8220;business as usual&#8221; politics. She&#8217;s a <em>product<\/em> of those politics, after all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Remember Sarah Palin asking us, mockingly, &#8220;How&#8217;d that hopey-changey thing work out for ya?&#8221; &#8212; after <em>hope<\/em> and <em>change<\/em> had been Obama&#8217;s watchwords? It didn&#8217;t work out very well at all, in fact&#8230; because <em>hope<\/em> and <em>change<\/em> are the first victims of business-as-usual.<\/li>\n<li>President Obama seemed, at first, to be the start of something big. Actually, I think, he was a fitting conclusion to all the something-<em>little<\/em> that had preceded him.<\/li>\n<li>Boy &#8212; both parties are going to be in a shambles if they don&#8217;t wake the heck up between now and November (and afterwards, when it comes to actual, y&#8217;know, <em>governing<\/em>).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<span class=\"su-dropcap su-dropcap-style-light\" style=\"font-size:2em\">A<\/span>bout that urgency&#8230;<\/p>\n<div style=\"border: 1px solid brown; width: 50%; float: right; margin-left: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; padding: 5px;\">[mp3-jplayer title=&#8221;The Times They Are A-Changin&#8217; (1964)&#8221; dload=&#8221;y&#8221; fontSize=&#8221;16px&#8221; font_family_1=&#8221;verdana&#8221; font_family_2=&#8221;lucida&#8221; tracks=&#8221;The Times They Are A-Changin.mp3&#8243; captions=&#8221;Bob Dylan&#8221;]<\/div>\n<p>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&#8217;ve written <a title=\"Earlier RAMH post: 'Midweek Music Break: Bob Dylan, 'The Times They Are A-Changin'''\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/midweek-music-break-bob-dylan-the-times-they-are-a-changin\/\" target=\"_blank\">at <em>RAMH<\/em> before<\/a> about Bob Dylan&#8217;s <em>The Times They Are A-Changin&#8217;<\/em>, and maybe the song needs to be to be trotted out again. This time around, I&#8217;d like to draw attention particularly to the opening stanza:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Come gather &#8217;round people<br \/>\nWherever you roam<br \/>\nAnd admit that the waters<br \/>\nAround you have grown<br \/>\nAnd accept it that soon<br \/>\nYou&#8217;ll be drenched to the bone<br \/>\nIf your time to you is worth savin&#8217;<br \/>\nThen you better start swimmin&#8217; or you&#8217;ll sink like a stone<br \/>\nFor the times they are a-changin&#8217;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>I cannot get these lyrics out of my head this year<\/em>. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s about climate change, of course (nobody was talking about climate change at that point in the 1960s). While I recognize the song&#8217;s genesis &#8212; again, at that point in history &#8212; I don&#8217;t think it really serves anymore as an intergenerational warning. No, I think there&#8217;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 <em>panic<\/em>. That first stanza isn&#8217;t a prescriptive, you-better-wake-up admonition; it&#8217;s a <em>de<\/em>scriptive <em>prophecy<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>(I use the word &#8220;prophecy&#8221; advisedly, and only because the song was written so long ago. If it had been written last week, I&#8217;d have called it a &#8220;report.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>We <em>should<\/em> be in a state of panic. We &#8212; the collective &#8220;we,&#8221; the global one &#8212; are in so much trouble right now, on all fronts, and all brought on by human activity and sustained by <em>in<\/em>activity: climate; economic inequality (along racial, gender, class, country-of-origin, and pretty much any other lines you want to draw); wars &#8212; and the threats of wars &#8212; across and within international boundaries; famine, plague, and drought; ignorance and superstition&#8230; and a chronic inability to do\u00a0anything about\u00a0any of it, except to distract ourselves via entertainment media and the Internet. (Those, at least, are two things we do brilliantly well.)<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Listen, I&#8217;m not a pie-in-the-sky &#8220;let&#8217;s burn and melt down all the currency in the world&#8221; or &#8220;let&#8217;s return to a barter economy&#8221; nutjob. (I sometimes think we might be better off now if we&#8217;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.)<\/p>\n<p>But damn &#8212; if we can solve or at least dilute the money problem, maybe we&#8217;ve at least got a chance to do so for all the consequent difficulties, too. <em>As long as there are big and easy profits to be made in <\/em>problems<em>, no <\/em>solutions<em> will ever come along<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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 <em>must<\/em> be, if we&#8217;re to resolve any of the crises facing us. We&#8217;ll never solve the war problem, as long as so much money is at stake in the arms trade; we&#8217;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&#8217;t have money for them; and as long as most of the wealth of the nation is locked up in (a) the acquisition of <em>more<\/em> wealth by <em>fewer<\/em> people and (b) internationally protected enterprises (banks, global conglomerates, currency trading, and so on).<\/p>\n<p>In debates, Clinton sometimes falls back on an easy gibe. She says, for instance, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t a one-issue job!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s a complicated world.<\/p>\n<p>But goddammit, she is <em>wrong<\/em> if she&#8217;s implying that a President must prioritize a whole basketful of issues <em>equally<\/em>, or can simply pick-and-choose an issue du jour. Especially, she is wrong if she&#8217;s implying that the economy isn&#8217;t actively fueling all the other fires to be fought.<\/p>\n<p>If we can&#8217;t solve the money problem, we can&#8217;t do a thing worth doing. It&#8217;s too late for halfway, incremental change. We have to do <em>the one thing<\/em>, and we have to do it <em>at least halfway right<\/em>, and we have to do it <em>as soon as possible<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2019ve probably written about 5,000 words into this post&#8217;s editing screen since I began fussing with it over a month ago. And I&#8217;ve deleted about that many words, and started over, and over, and over&#8230; Here&#8217;s the essence, though, presented at last as a bulleted list of Things I Know (or Imagine I Do): Florida&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"No sitting  on the fence this year: 'Things I (Imagine I) Know: The (Election) Year of Living Dangerously'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[895,4271,4272],"class_list":{"0":"post-17787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-02_in-the-news","7":"category-politics-in-the-news","8":"tag-bob-dylan","9":"tag-bernie-sanders","10":"tag-hillary-clinton","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4CT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17787"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17827,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787\/revisions\/17827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}