This A.M., I awoke to the present challenge, which is how to get on with the work I must do and the problems I must solve without devoting too much of my energy and grey matter to a problem I cannot even vaguely affect. The news makes Armchair Advisers out of all of us. I have a friend who works at a plant back east that bottles energy drinks and he spends a lot of every day thinking about how to fix the situation in Gaza. Cynically, I'm not sure there is a solution and realistically, I don't think that if there is, he's going to be the person to formulate it and put it into place.
I can dope out what I'd do if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden but all I can really do with any idea I have is post it here on my blog where, so far, I haven't even achieved the first step in the abolition of cole slaw. I can also remind myself that if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden, I'd have a lot more information (tons of it) that might help me shape my thinking. For one thing, I'd have a good answer to the question, "How often is he like that?" If the answer to that question is "Most of the time, lately," it's a very different problem from if the answer is "Never. He was sharp as an X-Acto knife Wednesday evening."
I read a number of interesting articles this morning including this one by David Kurtz. Here's a piece of it that I thought I'd share with you…
For their part, many partisans tend to observe debates and campaigns like sports fans, rooting for outcomes over which they have little or no control. I don't recommend that approach for your mental health, but it also sucks up an enormous amount of human and emotional capital, like spending all day on the sofa watching sports on TV instead of getting out and exercising yourself. The partisan-as-sports-fan risks becoming more deeply invested in their preferred outcomes and the roller coaster of emotions along the way than in the underlying cause.
I've never been able to get into sports. Once upon a time, I cared if the Dodgers won but only because it made my father so happy. I (of course) noted how unhappy it made him when they didn't and it didn't strike me as a fair trade-off. Maybe if he'd had money on the games and got a big payoff when they won, okay. But I don't care who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl because I don't get anything — monetary or otherwise — out of it. I don't even get the satisfaction of pretending I had something to do with the victory.
Following politics is a little different — who wins can affect my life and the lives of others around me — but I still don't have anything meaningful to do with the victories. I vote…that's about it. In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Biden/Harris ticket got 81,282,632 votes. Without mine, they would have gotten 81,282,631. Maybe, giving myself way more credit than I deserve, I also did the cheerleading that helped get a dozen other folks to go out and vote. Don't get me wrong: I'm still going to do everything I can to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term and turning the United States into a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization, an American privately-owned conglomerate owned by Donald Trump who is, in turn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the highest bidder.
But I think right now, the most meaningful contribution I can make aside from donating cash is to trust that Biden and the people around him will do the right thing. I dunno if that will involve Joe Biden stepping up or stepping down. But I do know I have things to do where I can make more of a difference. I think I'll go do one of them.