I'm going to use "you" in this next paragraph, but it's nothing personal. It doesn't make any difference if it describes you or somebody else.
You might believe you actually see the same shapes and colors that all those people in your "social" media see, when you look at an image of a daffodil. But you don't. You see the world as it's been curated to your individual taste, by a machine that tracks what you "Like" and who you "Friend" and what you look at, and where your mouse hovers, and what you click on, and how many seconds it takes you to read one line of text, and what keywords upset, arouse, depress, intrigue, and gross you out. You are unique. Exactly like everybody else.
Or, maybe not. So what? While the narrative-mongers hammer away trying to get the story straight, we're all kind of in limbo. This is not trivial, the narrative is important. It's critically important. It's a matter of life or death for millions of people. But it's going to be our new Bell-shaped Curve, and you are going to find yourself on it, somewhere.
It might take them a few days, but soon enough we'll think we knw whether Attorney General Garland will walk the perps, or decide the country needs to look forward, and can't handle both jobs at once (that worked before. Not.) We'll think we know if we're going to get those relief checks or not. We'll think we know if the vaccine has been parked in warehouses while the federal government was on its last blackout-binge of chaos and tragedy, or whether the delays were caused by hackers fiddling Bill Gates' nano-chip injections. We'll think we know if the country can possibly implement contact-tracing, like they have in Vermont, where they know exactly where the outbreaks started, and can isolate and vaccinate the hot spots. We'll think we know whether we have leadership that can put a comprehensive mitigation program in place that will shut the virus down, and catch the next one before it gets into human beings, the system that had been in place for decades until about 2017.
Maybe we'll see people who, so far, have survived the vicious corporate opioid marketing campaign get treatment instead of incarceration, homelessness and random death. Maybe coat-hanger back-alley abortions are not about to become the new normal. Maybe our police forces are going to be stopped from shooting unarmed people with impunity because they feel like it. Maybe the 1% will have to pay taxes. Maybe the oil companies will be forced to stop driving us extinct. Maybe we'll find out if there's any potable water left anywhere that isn't full of plastic, lead, and PFAS.
If I went on, this would be a thick book, and it would not be any fun to read. But you probably have an idea already, what the answers to these questions are likely to be. I'm just saying. Nothing is carved in stone, yet.
We do have this moment of possibility. It really could happen that people we pretend are our leaders will actually stand up for once, and deal straight with reality. What's Joe Biden got to lose? He seems to have lost just about everything, in his tragic lifelong winning streak.
The outgoing occupant showed just how much power a president could wield and get away with it. He proved the presidency isn't just an insult-puppet show: we saw how many people really could have helped, and just sat on their hands and said nothing, with each new swing of that awful wrecking ball. And remember, it was our narrative too. Our Bell-shaped Curve. I remember when I was a kid, and everybody used to talk about how they would have walked up to Hitler and punched him right in the nose! What was wrong with those Germans? Now we know.
But we took it. We took it lying down. We made excuses and turned away embarrassed (and sorry), and tried to protect our children from this grotesque caricature of a human being. This Pulpit Bully. We were shamed, and shamed again, and sorrier and sorrier. And still we let this go on. And we told ourselves, just one more year, and it'll be over. Just a month. Just a couple of weeks.
Ok. Time's up. And here's my question:
What if a president came along and used all that power, the power we kept giving the Chief Executive even while he sent children into oblivion while claiming Hilary ate them, what if the next guy (or gal) decided to use that de-facto "unitary" precedency, to set the world on a viable course? Is it so unthinkable? Consider that the new narrative is still wet. It hasn't totally set up yet. And nobody else in the world has the power we all now know a president has, to fix it.
Fix. It.
How 'bout it, Joe? Nobody can stop you now. Answer the call of your country's heart of hearts.
I still think Bernie would have.
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