Tonight, most rational people in the free world are celebrating the confirmation of victory by the Biden-Harris ticket as President Elect and Vice-President Elect of the United States of America. This confirmation by the Electoral College is monumental in critical ways. It affirms the power of democracy and the truly free world. It affirms sensibility and decency. It points towards civility and humanity to reemerge in the country.
Despite this hopeful moment, there are shadows all around the situation. While the profoundly deadly and destructive reach of SARS-CoV-2 is causing a crisis as significant as any in decades, it does not compare to the crisis we have seen as an eruptive cancer of failed human substance. And while there have long been people of frail characters, the 2020 election has exposed a cancer that exceeds most cancers in its malignancy, their metastatic viciousness, their apparent resistance to fundamental societal values. This cancer grows in a primary host – old or aging, Caucasian, shallow-charactered, desperately-insecure, weakly-egoed, falsely masculine, overstated males. The other strange association is with being immersed in an ideology that is monomorphic, anglo-embracing, rich-get-richer, insensitive, unlawful, disgusting, and seemingly changeless. It turns out that such males reside mainly in the political spectrum of the so-called extreme rightward, conservative, pseudo-religious faction. They are a truly embarrassing lot. If sad could not be sadder, the phenotype of fools has drifted downwards into younger Caucasian males with poor self-images, who like to yell and scream, carry guns that should be illegal, dress like aggravated dorks and threaten people or even knife them. This younger version of the white male caught up in the craziness of the soul-less deniers of democracy is a sorry legacy of a failed educational process, a lack of healthy role models, a social illness that is disturbing and quite bizarre.
We all know that in general the female species is more caring, more inclusive, more decent than the males. The females, overall, are also more thoughtful, reflective, sharing, selfless, and listening than males. They bring stability to an otherwise tenuous world of war, attacks, conquests and destructive adventures led by males without scruples or beliefs that align with the betterment of humankind. Only a few women view themselves as awful as the white men I have described. Those women who are in that camp of delusional thinking and acting somehow are subverted from what normal decency engenders.
The hope of the world depends on a new dominance of grace, of humility, of forgiveness, of self-effacement, of good humor, of pedagogy, of leadership, of breadth, of diversity, of understanding. We must know more about the planet, our environment, our oceans, our species, our societies, our solar system, our galaxy, our universe, our whole set of systems from molecules to the largest structures. We have to care more about that which is outside of the human being. We need to knock down greed for power, money, control, materiality and “stuff”. We certainly will not get where we need to go if we allow the morons who have tried to ruin the USA’s democracy during the current federal elections. We need to minimize the presence in images or voices of these terrible humans who have threatened worthy people, organizations and institutions as they have raged around the country, trying to damage a historically free, young society.
We need humanity in a way that is difficult to measure but which, in its limitlessness, sets us apart from barbarians.