A DOSE OF REALITY

By Ruth A. Sheets

Our Supreme Court conservatives like to pretend they are something they call, “originalists,” meaning they can somehow, read the minds and intentions of the founders, writers of our Constitution.  It is clear they can’t, but they do seem, along with the Trump campaign to want to drag us back to that time.  I keep reading that people actually lived a long time back then, if they survived childhood, pregnancy and child birth, and the diseases that plagued people around the world.  I suspect it was not as many as those writers would like us to believe.  However, clearly enough people survived to reproduce in numbers high enough to keep our species growing in number.  I get it that there are romantic ideas of what life was like237 years ago or so, but to want to live back then, not on your life, and that spoken by a woman who wanted to live at the time of our American Revolution when I was a 10–14-year-old. 

I believe the life-expectancy at the end of the 18th Century was about 47 years.  As mentioned above, many did live longer but a large number of children died before age 5 and in some places, around 1 in 10 women died in childbirth, and then there are the diseases that regularly killed or disabled people.  Why would anyone want to live back then, even in spirit.  The thought patterns of people living in such conditions with such challenges would not be the same as ours.  We can translate their writings into something comprehensible today, but to imagine we can interpret our world in the same way the founders did theirs is nonsense!

Therefore, it really is disturbing that a bunch of middle-aged and old white guys want to drag us back into the past. I think they have no clue, but because they have so much money, they have made up a pretend golden age that will let them have all the things they want while everyone else is left hanging and clawing for something in survival mode.

Consider that until rather recently:

we didn't have cancer drugs, but there was cancer.

We didn't have high blood pressure medicine, but there was high blood pressure.

We didn’t have manufactured insulin, but there was diabetes.

we did have abortion, but it was often deadly.

We didn’t have antibiotics, but there was infection.

We didn’t have accurate weather prediction, but there were tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, and the rest.

We didn’t have vaccines, but we had deadly viral diseases like small pox, polio, and measles.

We didn’t have phones, cables, planes, satellites, but there was long-distance communication, very slow and problematic.

A lot of those guys wanting to drag us back into the past are on advanced medications including cancer drugs, antibiotics, and use vaccines. They also depend on their cell phones for communication and the US Weather Service to make travel plans and protect their homes.  I think that when a collection of privileged people gets together and discuss what they want the nation to be like, they start heading down that old rabbit hole of illusion that ignores reality, putting center stage only what they want and need.  somehow acting like the rest of us don’t exist or they put us in our place, inferior to themselves, of course. We scare the hell out of them, so they want to be sure we have no or limited power.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been using phrases like “forward” and “we won’t go back” to try to counter some of this Republican fake nostalgia.  They believe that if the folks who are not rich, white, pseudo-christian, "straight" men would stand together, we could forcefully inform those guys we are not going back and that we are not inferior or superior, but at the same level as they are 

That understanding would be hard for those guys because they have been told most of their lives that they are better than everyone else and that is why they are rich, successful, and in power.  Their families, teachers, friends, universities neglected to inform them that most of what they have has come from privilege, family wealth and genetics, some talent, but mostly luck, a dose of reality they desperately need. 

Maybe, our task as fellow Americans is to enlighten them.  It might help them to notice the rest of us for a change and that we are not their pawns. And, once we have informed them, we could find ways to help them kick their addiction to money and power, probably the most powerful addiction out here. 

So, Harris and Walz, keep sowing the truth.  Keep looking to the future, a better future where the powerful are set down a few pegs and the rest of us are heard.  It could happen, and at the polls, we can vote to make it so!