Election Day

In my post of October 15 - "Watching Out for Each Other" - I departed from writing about running and building stone walls and raking leaves and talked about the 2020 election.  That was the first day for early voting in Highlands and Martha and I were, if I remember correctly, No. 94 and 95 at the polls.  We were not the only ones to vote early; nearly 100 million other voters took advantage of early voting or have already cast absentee ballots.  That far surpasses anything we have ever seen in this country.

I think I made it pretty clear who I voted for on October 15.  The current occupant of the White House may have believed, when he saw Nazis marching in the streets in Charlottesville over two years ago, that there were "very fine people on both sides."  Not me.  I know what side I'm on.

There were only two choices before the electorate this year.  I have learned a great deal about Joe Biden over the past couple of decades, and I have always admired him.  I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the current occupant of the White House, so much so that I don't even like using his name.  It almost seems like an obscenity.  And yet his supporters are everywhere, even among my own circle of friends, who seemed to be willing to give an outsider a chance four years ago but now surely must see how terribly wrong that decision has proven to be.  Even here in Highlands, his zealous supporters have been driving in so-called "Trump Parades," a line of pickup trucks driving down Main Street, honking horns loudly and flying Trump flags.  This group was standing on the corner of Main Street and Third Street on Saturday.

I can't remember ever seeing anything like this in Highlands - nobody brandished Romney or McCain or Bush or Obama flags in parades down Main Street.  But I suppose that sums up the past four years pretty well:  we've never seen anything like it before.  Children in cages, Nazis marching in the streets, warm handshakes with Vladimir Putin, our foreign alliances in tatters, the economy the worst since the Great Depression, and a deadly pandemic growing worse and worse by the day.

One of my Facebook friends posted this photograph which summed up pretty well the contrast between the two candidates we have before us this year.

I'll choose the decent-looking guy, the one sitting comfortably on a bench in blue jeans with his smiling wife.  The one with the dog.  I know that if he wins the election, no matter what our problems may be, he will urge us to work together, not try to divide us.  He will work for progress.  And I will sleep better knowing that there are competent hands on the steering wheel.