This election, both at the state and federal level, presents a choice that couldn’t be more starkly defined. Do we want to live in a nation and state of germinating, percolating, energy that favors a culture with unlimited opportunity, or one stagnant, hierarchical, defined and inert, deterministically confining opportunities without any free will and always predictable (the easiest, lazy way for profit-seeking calculations to be made)?
The pairing-down of that opportunity has already begun with privatized public goods like the healthcare “squeezing” of Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA, from our public treasury. Or in the post office, where Trump’s Dejoy has nearly doubled the price of a first-class stamp in the last five years. Public goods filtered through cost/benefit analysis of profit-motivated businesses only results in cost increase and the demeaning of value — the synergy multiplier in our cultural cohesion.
Even for these libertine MAGA affiliates, duped into their contrived sense of control by simply calculating their social path to winning interpersonal domination, are guiltless having been socialized in this free market paradigm of winners and losers. Guideposts that not only produced venture and vulture capitalists, but has birthed predatory sex offenders and misanthropic school and festival machine-gunners, coercing “predation” as the most efficient means of achieving one’s end.
Until sufficient, Golden Rule (do unto others…) regulation can reign these markets back to the mutual trust capitalism requires, to even fulfill some semblance of efficient and fair resource distribution, we must be promoting leaders conscientious in their role to serve others. Despairingly, our two-party system has been dismembered by the “fear of loss” factor, crystalized during the previous administration but driven leaders on the right for at least the last 40 years since Reagan and Gingrich.
The MAGA-reinforced Grand Old Party, autocratically fantasizing in a libertarian dream to “cement” society so that they may “game” each other for material self-gain, must be discouraged; both for us today, that we may achieve our personal “ends” of fulfilled satisfaction, but more importantly, by turning from this cynical vision, we can assure it so for our children tomorrow? The MAGA contrived cultists, mis- and uninformed to be manipulated, are hoping to drive our leviathan down to their private reality of conspiring, predatory lifestyles.
That’s the fulcrum we will all — by one (wo)man one vote — be opting to incline our culture with our vote Nov. 5. Will our offspring be looking to achieve fulfilled satisfaction in a world only constrained by their imagination and the “Golden Rule” of social decorum? Or will they be condemned to a world of co-misery, coerced into the oligarchical despots indentured servitude?
Vote for our children, vote for Kamala and Mary. As women, they already have an inside track with Mother Earth.
• John Sonin is a Douglas resident.
