CLOCK TICKING ON TRUMP AS BIDEN BIDES TIME TILL RESULTS COME IN
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
America has voted.
And to the victor today go the spoils of four years.
Americans will either roll back the clock to Donald Trump or move forward with Joe Biden’s new years’ resolutions.
The United States election is a world of concern. Ballots cast south of the border may be counted and counted — and even recounted — in the hours, days, coming weeks and beyond.
But they count in every country in its shadow — most closely Canada.
We all have stake in its fallout.
It’s not a just a referendum on the handling of a pandemic, social behaviour, business and beliefs, but a reflection on four more years.
A planetary portent, perhaps.
A reopening of 2016’s Pandora’s box, or a veering veep who is no “Sleepy Joe” or “Ordinary Joe.”
You can start by wondering in a close vote how the 231,000 people who died of COVID-19 would have voted?
Ironically, the U.S. CDC said today people who tested positive can vote in person if they are asymptomatic.
Voyeuristically it’s easy to sympathize with a divided electorate; but virtually impossible to empathize with a perturbed populace.
The lived American experience is unique, as expressly exported, pervasively promoted, and perceived through bullish business and entertainment industries.
A history as a warmonger with interventionist self interests, sees most Americans with militaristic familial ties as soldiers or munitions factory workers that has given over to an insurmountable gun culture that nightly turns streets into mass killing fields observed and shared online.
Born with hope as independent sovereign states free from paternalistic British tyranny, its Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That was 1776.
The U.S. has undergone a sea change in attitudes in the intervening 244 years.
In 2020 it’s all women and men who are created equal, with the right not to get shot, the liberty not be infected by people without masks and the happy pursuit of a respectful, greater earthly and human working good.
Pitifully that in principle not practice is a nub of the vote.
Americans choose between a president who arguably has made America great again by uniting possibly most of the country against his actions and policies.
And a career politician mentored by his “brother” Barack O’Bama.
Both are white, old men with their incomparable flaws.
“Shut up” and “clown” comments aside, Biden compares relatively decent compared to Trump.
And for voters with long-held libertarian leanings tempered — only by Grand Old Party classical liberalism and paleoconservatism political ideologies — Trump’s their guy.
For all his lack of political skills, instincts, compassion, truths and social corruptions, Trump has arguably met a payroll — if not paid a ton of taxes — and been on the hot seat in the White House Oval Office, which most voters haven’t, can’t relate to and can only dream of.
At the end of today — tomorrow or next week — America will wake up in January led by the men or man and woman who reflect the new world order as strong partners and not isolationists.
The next president will have to learn from past failures, correct them and meet the unpredictable challenges like a pandemic that 2021 and beyond will no doubt bring.
Americans know what Trump will bring.
They’ve lived and died Trumpism and emerged — if divided — stronger in their united pursuit of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Biden offers none of the former, more of the latter and is a more prudent presidential choice to end fake news, the COVID chaos, offer LTCs TLC, and unite the states and rid the world racism, misogyny and killer cops among a long list of wrongs that need immediate undoing.
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