Summer is fading fast into early fall where I live. I have already had a few roaring fires in my fireplace as overnight temps slip into the high thirties. Our fireplace has an elevated hearth where I enjoy sitting as I soak up warmth from a primeval source that has been a comfort for our species for longer than we have records or memory. The only thing that I enjoy more than sitting in front of a fire and looking into its flames as a form of solitaire meditation is sitting in front of the fire and visiting with family and friends. I fear that this fall and winter I won’t be sharing the fireplace with anyone other than my wife. Coming indoors as fall progresses toward winter will mean descending into ever increasing isolation. Having darkness at four o’clock is hard enough, but being alone on a cold winter evening will be even more depressing. I wonder what Thanksgiving and Christmas will be like. As moderator of my congregation, I am already engaged in conversations with our minister and staff about how we will handle Christmas services since singing carols in a closed sanctuary with a furnace recirculating hot air seems like a mechanism for distributing coronavirus to a large group of people.
As the focus of existence shifts from outdoors to indoors, I realize that warm summer afternoons and evenings have allowed us the luxury of gathering outdoors with friends and family in small groups while maintaining social distancing. How will we cope as we are forced indoors? During the spring and summer we have been able to be quite creative in our efforts to cope with the need for social distancing. It has been a joy and a relief to be able to frequently meet with friends in the late afternoon and early evening on our deck or theirs. The visitors usually bring their own food and beverages to further diminish direct contact. Those sorts of events will not be possible in a few weeks.
For six months we have been adapting to uncertainty, managing our realistic apprehension, and compensating for continuing loss by socially distancing in the open air. Fall has exposed us to increased uncertainty as we struggle with the appropriateness of children returning to school, and the confusion associated with the social behavior of late adolescents going to college who feel indestructible or don’t have the frontal lobe stability to exercise appropriate caution for themselves or empathy for others whom their behavior might harm. What will things be like when we must be indoors during December, January, and February? Is Dr. Fauci right when he says that we will not have the benefit of a vaccine until late in 2021 to free us from the real concerns associated with the resumption of normal social behavior?
There is still much to worry about as we have become exhausted from worry. Yesterday morning, I accompanied one of the people that I have been trying to help through Kearsarge Neighborhood Partners on a visit to the town welfare officer. The header for this post is a picture of the entrance of our town offices. The town offices sit on the left side of our town green and are housed in the 1837 building that was the original structure used by Colby Academy which is now Colby-Sawyer College. What is most important to notice is that there are no transactions in the building. The town welfare officer met us on the green at a picnic table. That is fine on a clear day in September even though it was only 60 and there was a breeze that made a jacket a necessity. Where will we meet in November? The trip was a success. My client was granted $900 for the September rent and another $400 for a car payment and car insurance, but the welfare officer’s message was clear, the town does not have unlimited resources and don’t expect help in October.
The president wants us to think that we will have a vaccine before the election. Whether he is right or not, what we will not have is relief from the damage done to the economy by mismanagement of the pandemic and the political divide that has prevented a second relief bill from passing Congress and being sent to the president for signing into law. One of the big hang ups is that the House bill provides relief to state and local governments that have been caught in the double bind of falling tax revenue and increasing public service demands from the pandemic. I am not sure how many Americans realize that state and local governments have lost 500 billion dollars to the pandemic. Many of us know that the Senate has not agreed to anything like the bill that has passed the House, but how many people know that the issues are more complex than whether the relief to individuals should be $300 or $600 dollars per week. The relief to individuals would provide greatly needed help to people like my client, but perhaps equally important is to get relief from the economic losses associated with the pandemic for towns, cities, and states.
There have been so many issues that have risen to the level of crisis, and so much complexity and intertwining of issues over the last six months that I fear we are at great risk of many people withdrawing their attention from the election because they are overwhelmed or depressed. I was interested to discover this week that Washington Post columnist E.J. Dione was speaking eloquently to my concerns in a column entitled “A realist’s case against despair.” Dione’s opening lines were speaking directly to me.
What in the world happened to hope?
It’s hard to remember a gloomier time in our public life. So much of the analysis we read, the news we consume and the hot takes that fly by us on social media suggest that the exits from this dreadful era are blocked. We’re led to believe that our country faces inexorable decline and that those who see the possibility of reform and redemption are deluded.
My response to those lines is to shout, “Please give me a different point of view. Give me reason to have hope.” The rest of the column is Dione’s attempt to fill the glass of hope with some facts that are truly alternative in tone to much of what we are being fed. He begins by pointing out that the chief prophet of doom is the president himself. He writes:
We owe much of this pessimism to the presidency of Donald Trump, and not just because of his blindingly obvious failures. Unlike most incumbents in our history, he has bet his political survival on the proposition that the country is living through a dystopian nightmare that only he can dispel.
This last week the president has topped himself with a new alternative view that he is doing such a great job, and the country’s threats are so great that there is good reason to grant him several more terms of office, not just one more. I was flabbergasted when that piece of information first reached my ears, but we have learned that he is rarely joking, and there is intent behind most of his pronouncements. Why not? If the road we are on looks like the road to authoritarian rule, who is to say that we will not eventually get there? That thought certainly throws more water on drowning hopes.
After painting this dark opening picture, Dione presents Joe Biden as living on the sunny side of the street.
It is former vice president Joe Biden, the challenger, who has the sunny view. The heart of his argument is that there is nothing wrong with our country that can’t be cured as long as we throw Trump out of office.
That is sort of a twist from the usual state of affairs. Let me repeat the last big point for emphasis. In most elections the incumbent is the one saying that he should be reelected because everything is great. Our incumbent has the perspective that he should be reelected because things are so bad that he is our savior. In our current situation it is the challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, that is saying that we are basically OK, just in need of the extraction of the problem, like removing an infected tooth to cure one big toothache. (That image appeals to me since I am one week post extraction of an infected molar.)
But, as DIone points out, even Biden’s supporters, folks like me, are filled with pessimistic concerns. There are many explanations for this confusing reality; not the least of wish is a loss of confidence in the electoral process.
There is, first, the fear that even if Biden wins the popular vote — this now seems nearly inevitable — he might lose the electoral college. And if Biden prevails there, too, it is easy to imagine Trump trying to cling to power by discrediting the result with a pack of lies about the voting process.
There have been several solid and reliable political thinkers like David Brooks who have been warning us that the president might not accept the results of the election, and that there could be an ensuing constitutional crisis or some form of insurrection from his supporters, many of whom are owners of the almost 400 million extant firearms in our society. In a column entitled “What Will You Do if Trump Doesn’t Leave? Playing out the nightmare scenario,” Brooks writes:
[What if..]
…Trump says he won’t let Democrats steal the election and declares himself re-elected. It’s an outrage, but as when he used the White House for a campaign prop during his convention, who’s going to stop him?
A certain kind of Republican takes to the streets to enforce Trump’s version of events. According to research done by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt, 50 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Nearly as many believe, “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
Brooks goes on to imagine that the far left won’t go quietly into the night, and implies that the streets could become the place where the issues are settled. I find the possibility of armed insurrection to be sad since one thing that we have prided ourselves on and taken for granted as a country has been our ability to peacefully transfer power through elections. In the year of COVID, George Floyd, fires in the West, hurricanes in the Gulf, and a president who will lie to an exhausted and frightened public, can we count on being what we have always been?
Dione would like to think that we can muddle through, but he does not totally disregard the warnings coming from Brooks and others:
There is, first, the fear that even if Biden wins the popular vote — this now seems nearly inevitable — he might lose the electoral college. And if Biden prevails there, too, it is easy to imagine Trump trying to cling to power by discrediting the result with a pack of lies about the voting process.
Dione sees potential problems even if Biden wins and Trump accepts defeat. Presenting the views of another Post writer, Annie Linskey, he comments:
In this view, moderates and progressives in the party will wage war over specific issues such as the shape of a future health-care program, and on the larger question of how adventurous Biden’s overall agenda should be. And nobody is expecting Republicans to make Biden’s job any easier.
Dione hangs in with hope through the tour of dire possibilities. The outcome he desires is a resounding win for Biden and a “blue wave” that gives the Democratic Party control of Congress, as well as the presidency. He then sees the possibility for something remarkable like a “New New Deal,” or even more amazing, the beginning to the end of racism as described by Adam Serwer in a recent Atlantic article entitled The New Reconstruction: The United States has its best opportunity in 150 years to belatedly fulfill its promise as a multiracial democracy.
I am praying that Dione’s vision is the one that emerges as the reality we will eventually enjoy. A decisive win for Biden and a “blue wave” in November that empowers Democrats to reverse many of the losses that President Trump has inflicted on the country and the whole world would be a powerful antidote for my COVID wintertime blues. I could hang in through the cold, and the need for continuing isolation during the winter months, if there were some hope that in the spring we could begin to repair the economy by giving those in need, like the client that I went with to town hall, the help that we all need them to have.
It would be wonderful to know that the government was led by someone who believes in universal access to healthcare and who would empower those who believe in the Triple Aim. Would it not be nice to have a president who understands the importance of public health and gives appropriate attention to the search for solutions to the inequities in the social determinants of health? Such a person might also believe in the importance of science. And, if I dare to dream even more, after the election, I would be delighted if we might be fortunate enough to be led by someone who understands the need to address global warming. I would assume that such an individual would also realize that local government desperately needs support as we began the repair of the long neglected infrastructure of the nation. That would be like the joy and relief of waking up from a fitful night, and realizing that it was all a bad dream.
It is still seven weeks until the election, but only two weeks until the first debate. The debates will be a big challenge for both candidates. I hope they also boost the possibilities of emerging from these dark days, and move us one step closer to ending this dreadful bad dream that we all have been sharing for much too long.
