The Witness Chronicles, September 19, 2024

A morning walk on a perfect fall day is better than politics

Photo by Endri Killo on Unsplash

Calming Down

The chaos caught up with me

I have been trying to write about the political chaos and yesterday it was all so out of control, I could not capture it, at least not to my satisfaction. I need a break and I suspect we all need a break.

At least that’s what I told myself this morning when I woke up. Don’t read the news, read a book, chill out, take an early walk, etc. Well, I have not done any of those things, yet. I scanned the news, which filled my head with a lot of details about people like Vance, who is now declaring legal things illegal because he disagrees with them, so he can lie to the public and it’s ok.

How did this campaign swivel into stories about Haitian immigrants in a small city in Ohio? A woman loses her cat, tells someone else, who posts something on social media where somehow it becomes a story about legal immigrants eating pets, and without checking any facts, a vice presidential candidate tells America this is really happening.

Here’s where this story gets even more bizarre. The woman who lost her cat found it yesterday. It had been shut in her basement by accident. Apparently it’s fine.

But now this Haitian thing has become the theme of the Trump/Vance campaign. It’s so blatantly racist that I can’t even…

Yesterday, the Fed lowered interest rates by .5%, something we should all be very happy about after four years of inflation and high rates on everything. The Fed is not a political group. They are independent by design. Trump actually appointed the current Fed leader, Jerome Powell.

But everything is political these days and now this welcome move for the economy is being called a political gift for Harris and Walz. But the Trump people have largely abandoned economic policy because it’s too complicated for Trump to explain, things look too good right now, and people are dumb and don’t really care about it.

So we get pet eating Haitians.

Is it any wonder I’m fatigued mentally from thinking about this stuff? If there is a volume control for crazy, the Trump campaign has turned it up to eleven. But that volume is not something they can sustain, nor can the audience handle it for another five weeks.

Writing about politics is weird enough. Just writing the word ‘weird’ has become political, but let’s face it, this is all extremely weird. Let me qualify that. Republican politics has become extremely weird. Harris and the Dems are simply watching this all unfold.

They don’t need to help things along because the right is doing a fine job of shooting themselves in the foot every time they try anything. I’m not sure sitting on the sidelines is a good strategy for the Harris/Walz ticket, but it would be a huge risk to get down into the muck with Trump and Vance.

That’s their home territory.

So, it’s sanity v. insanity, plain and simple, but that is what it has always been about. You’d think that would be clear to American voters, but things are neck and neck. I have a theory about why. This is just seen as reality TV by many, an entertaining show we know is entirely fake and staged but a good excuse for not dealing with reality.

And in a wonderfully horrible twist, the central character was the star of his own actual reality TV show, The Apprentice.

I don’t watch reality TV, reality is enough for me. But there has been speculation that many Trump supporters think that the fabricated situations in Trump’s reality TV show were real. One little tidbit that came out recently was that the producers of the show had to overrule Trump regarding who he fired because his judgment was so bad it made for lousy television.

He had a tendency to fire the competent people and reward the incompetent ones.

Now, in reality, it really does make for lousy television and we can’t turn it off because it’s real. The actors, like Vance, are playing for outrage and shock and a lot of voters are loving it, while the rest of us throw up our hands in disgust.

Is it any wonder I woke up this morning resolved to have a day without thinking about this stuff? Well, you’re reading just how well that went for me. But there’s plenty of day left so maybe I can rescue a little of it.

We’ll see.

After writing this I walked downtown to a cafe for a coffee. It’s the picture of a perfect fall morning, 75 and sunny. One species of trees with tiny leaves are turning a golden yellow and the leaves are raining down, giving the world a kind of glow.

The cafe is next to the Eastman School of Music and there are students everywhere carrying instruments in cases, cellos, guitars, and horns, and three old geezers (even older than me!) sitting behind me talking about their health and the weather.

For me this is a kind of reset from this borderline obsession with politics, a needed break from the toxicity of it all. A reminder that no, this place is not a hellhole populated by criminal immigrants, it’s a beautiful place we need to protect.

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