After the first presidential debate, the whole nation is panicked because one candidate can’t stop lying and the other can’t stop stuttering . . . because all we have left is a choice between a mad man and an old man.
We have fallen hard into the trap of investing our dignity, our hearts and minds, and the future of our children and grandchildren in one faltering man or the other. We are looking to only two possible saviors to solve all our problems and heal the nation. We are looking to autocracy as our new form of government, not democracy or republicanism.
The two candidates aren’t the problem, folks. We are the problem. In a representative government, the real issue is the capacity of the people to solve problems locally and to send capable folks to state houses and Washington, D.C., to make good laws. We can’t do either in 2024. We are a terribly backslidden people, and our leaders are drawn from our ranks.
The networks interviewed voters before and after the debate, and – big surprise – not one of them could articulate a serious legal or political/constitutional issue. All were stuck either on personality concerns or grocery concerns.
We have been taught to believe we are grocery deprived by the political pundits who don’t want us to understand the real issues. We are taught to think with our wallets, not with our brains. Until we learn more about the real issues in a democracy, we aren’t of much use to God, family or country.
ABC’s David Muir says, “It’s how the voter feels.” No, it isn’t David. It’s about what is between the voters’ ears. The challenge for America is to increase the number of adults in the voting booth, in our workplaces, in our statehouses and in our homes.
The two candidates, for their part, framed every statement about an issue in terms of what “I did” or “he did,” not in terms of what we the people need to do. Trump at one point said, “I changed that.” He alone enacts policy, and he alone will enact policy if he is elected again. Biden does not lag far behind in his self-image as the “Decider-in-Chief,” as George W. Bush was fond of calling himself.
The people don’t do democracy by electing one autocrat or the other. The people do democracy by participating in local government. Today, the American people have very little interest in participating in government. They want to holler at sports games, eat out at restaurants and make enough money to live in luxury like celebrities do.
The political priorities of our incapacitated people boil down to either one of two things: raiding the public treasury to make things easier on themselves (Democrats) or skewing the tax structure so the other guy must carry the burden of government (Republicans).
That is a me-me-me approach to life. We need to start thinking about our neighbors and the young people who will inherit what little we have left to leave behind.
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of books and editorials on democracy, religion and the American presidency, and lives in Woods Cross, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City.
