Good Morning.
The country is divided, no question about it. Actually it's in smithereens because of issues like health care, immigration, trade policies, the Second Amendment, abortion, college tuition, climate change, all manner of conflict in the Middle East, the Supreme Court, gay marriage, taxes, balanced budgets, Russian meddling around the world, campaign finance, voter registration, the role of a free press, government shutdowns, and the current president himself. People in the south and the Bible belt tend to favor certain positions on all of the above with those on the west coast and in the northeast heading in other directions,even though there are exceptions to every rule. We have red states, blue states, purple states, safe states, swing states, and toss-up states. We label people as liberal, moderate, conservative, socialist, ultra-right, evangelical, the center, the center right, the center left, and on and on and on. The thing we all have in common is that we are utterly convinced we are right about everything and everyone else is nuts.
There are some positives amidst the messiness. During the 2016 presidential campaign, there were seventeen candidates for the Republican nomination, including an African American physician, a former governor of Indian descent, a woman corporate executive, and several Catholics. This field never would have existed fifty years ago. A woman, whose main primary opponent was Jewish, was the nominee of the Democratic party and came within an eyelash of being elected. Whatever you thought of her, she opened a lot of doors and none of them will ever be closed quietly or slammed shut again. In 2018, a record number of women of diverse backgrounds were elected to Congress, many of them young and outspoken. The Speaker of the House, also a woman, commented after one of the youngsters used some colorful street language to describe what she hoped would be the fate of the president: "It would not be phraseology my generation would choose," she said but probably smiled when she was safely back in her office.
Now comes the 2020 political season and already we have nine announced candidates for the Democratic nomination. There are four women out there, including the black former Attorney General of California who is now a United States senator and a Hindu woman of Samoan heritage who is a Congresswoman. We have a Hispanic man who is the former mayor of San Antonio and the former Secretary of HUD and a Chinese entrepreneurial businessman. We have the African American former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, now a senator, a former congressman from Maryland whose name makes me quite certain that he's an Irishman, and an openly gay man, a Rhodes scholar who is now the mayor of South Bend, Indiana These people are reportedly just the beginning of what will be a large number of candidates but they're an auspicious beginning, whatever you think about their positions on the issues.
The governor of Virginia, a Democrat, is under fire for a photo on his medical school yearbook page that shows a character in black face next to someone in the garb of the Ku Klux Klan. Dear Lord, what kind of med school puts out a publication like that? The guy needs to resign even if he says he's grown up a bit over the past thirty-five years. The message needs to be unequivocal that we don't do this excluding, demeaning, supremacist stuff anymore, regardless of where someone stands on the issues.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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