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Monday, March 2, 2020

Our Troubled Times

By Sharon Stoner

So, South Carolina likes Joe Biden. If the same contender won each pivotal state it would be much easier to choose the Democratic candidate than it seems destined to be.
    While Biden took South Carolina, I am not sure I will vote for him in Florida’s primary. However, he would be a good choice for the Democrats, better than Bernie Sanders would be at proposing a realistic agenda.

    Sanders says much that I agree with: truths about various Republicans and about what’s happening in this country. So why wouldn’t he be a good choice? Former Republican Senators have commented that when Obama was President, Republicans were warned or threatened not to vote for anything Obama wanted, even if it was good for the Country!
    Sanders is a wild card and I believe that if he were elected President, Republicans would do to him the same thing they did to Obama. That’s why I think that Biden would be a reasonable, logical choice for Democrats to choose to run against Trump.


A friend of mine says that Bernie Sanders isn’t his preferred Democratic candidate for President but he’ll vote for him or for whoever else it might be. Anyone but Trump. To improve the chances of ridding the country of Trump, he thinks maybe we ought to not just vote, but get actively involved in telephoning, knocking on doors, etc.
    Polls say that millennials are behind Bernie. Research says those young people are deeply in debt, have little or no health insurance coverage, tend to try to be self-employed, and will not live as long as our generation because of poor nutrition...so, do I trust their pick for President?


Anyway, I myself am not physically able to go knocking, but what makes anyone think that the Electoral College won’t do again what it did to Hillary four years ago? Frankly, I’m not sure who I’ll vote for. Some of the Democratic contenders are awfully  old, but on the other hand they might for that reason be more likely to keep their mitts off Social Security and Medicare.
    When it comes to Pete Buttigieg, would people put a gay President (and a First Gentleman) in office? I like Buttigieg, but that would concern me, given that we urgently need to dump Trump. And now he seems to have dropped out of the race.


I play Canasta on Thursdays and Fridays with some ladies in a gated community of the super rich. Everyone who lives there has a yacht – not a boat, but a yacht. All of these ladies are Republicans and don’t give a crap about the poor or the moron in the White House. They like him. The other day they were whispering about how the nation’s problems are the blacks and the Mexicans.
    Funny, but without the Mexicans these women’s yards would look like deserts, their babies’ diapers wouldn’t get changed, and they would have to dine in restaurants or at the club house rather than at home.
    They seem like nice ladies...until politics comes up. Then they turn into uninformed idiots. It’s very hard to just ignore them and not say anything.


I wish the Democratic contenders would use their debates as a platform to say how they would run the country instead of trying to throw mud on each other. Trying to find dirt on others’ tweets sounds like the behavior of a jealous child. We’ve had enough of Trump the child-dictator President “doing his orange clown pufferfish routines” (to quote Maureen Dowd’s column “Trump Makes Us Ill,” in Saturday’s New York Times).
    Trump did one of those routines in the interview where he said the coronavirus has nothing to do with the Stock Market’s drop in points, it was caused by the stupid way the Democrats sound in the debates. You may think things couldn’t possibly get more ridiculous, but the debates do make it easier for people taken in by Trump’s con job to believe him when he says things like that. I’m still appalled that millions think Trump is perfect! How can such delusion be so widespread? Some kind of mental virus?
    What will history books say about this period of our history?


Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Stoner

3 comments:

  1. Sharon, thank you much for trying to unburden your heart by telling us some of the things that have been troubling it. We have all suffered under Trump’s “administration,” including those millions of us who don’t seem to have what it takes to empathize with the suffering of others or recognize their own degradation.

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  2. For those who are old enough to remember the riots at the 68 Demo Conversation in Chicago. I was young and stupid back then as were a lot of my friends. Like the Bernie followers we believed we could change the world, but in the end, we only tore it down. We threw open the doors for Richard Nixon to walk right in to the White House and gave power to the right wing of that party. And the Democrat Party has never been the same. The same cry for change echoes through time. There is nothing new that Bernie is proposing. I bought into the same song and dance in 68 and still agree in principal with it all. The fact however, is that none of it will be made into law. The 25% that support Bernie will not be voting for anyone but Bernie. The idea that Joe or anyone else will woo them over is a joke...you would have a better chance of getting Trump voters to switch. If Bernie losses, they will try and destroy the Democrat Party. In 68 I walked away but the ones that stayed dismantled the old party and gave us the mess we have today. Even the election of Obama did not repair the damage done to the foundation. With Bernie at the head of the ticket, both parties will have been destroyed. One extreme is as bad as other.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, Ed, for these observations, bleak though they be. They mirror much of what I'm hearing from a kaffeeklatsch of university graduates I am in contact with. We indeed do live (and have lived and continue to live) in troubled times.

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