Our two major POTUS candidates’ visions of our future are starkly different.

One envisions revenge and retribution, the other recovery and reunification.

 

I don’t know about you, but I am so tired of living inside an “ideological/political war zone,”

where the people with whom we don’t live, love, or agree are deemed “the enemy within.”

It’s fucking miserable!!!

 

So, the way I see it, the only way to redeem the situation is to STOP BEHAVING LIKE ENEMIES and start behaving like neighbors, collaborators, and friends who have each other’s backs.

 

I realize this is going to be easier for one side than for the other, because we orbit around starkly different information planets, both of which spend an awful lot of time critiquing the other planet’s purity when it comes to putting out “facts” — loosely defined here as our “ideological spin on policy matters and politicians.”

 

And we know that one planet has been fined $787 million dollars for lying to its audience. (That would be Fox, which defines itself as an entertainment company, not a news organization.)  To me, the Fox form of “entertainment” is a huge disservice to the people who tune in and rely on them as their “fair and balanced” source of “news.”   OMG!  Is all I can say about that without going off on a tangent.

 

So, how do we repair this chasm, this breach?

 

By consciously reducing our consumption of, and addiction to, fear-based propaganda.

 

The only major candidate willing to and capable of doing that is Kamala Harris.  She doesn’t consider, or call, the people who disagree with her “the enemy from within.”  She reaches out to all Americans, inviting them to aspire to the better angels of our natures (in Abraham Lincoln’s elegant turn of phrase as he began to heal the nation from a terrible Civil War) anD to view those who disagree with us not as enemies but as fellow sojourners just walking each other home after a horrendous war of words, and thoughts, and deeds.

 

God, what a refreshing breath of fresh air!

 

I am voting for hope, not hate, for rest and recovery, not revenge and retribution.

 

I am voting for the adults in this race: Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and every other Democrat all down my ballot this year because I realize the existential threat that the reconfigured Trumpublican Party poses to our Constitution (for well-documented details, read Project 2025, the January 6th Report, and prosecutor Jack Smith’s recent document detailing Trump’s and his cohorts in Congress’s concerted, multi-state efforts to have a free and fair election wrested from its victors, Biden-Harris, and reassigned to himself) and our ability to treat each other the way each of us deserves to be treated: with compassion, love and respect for our dignity and worth as human beings.

 

I think if a lot more people vote similarly, we will seize a real opportunity, this year and beyond, to mend fences and become a United States again  — one with policy disagreements, surely,  but willing to view other Americans as equally worthy of consideration, compassion, justice, and human rights.

 

Love requires more of us. 

But it’s far much more satisfying than hate, bigotry, apathy, and indifference.

Let’s try love and listening for a change.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are masters at both!