‘The best day’ of their lives’
Think about it, good people: We have 34 days left in the election season, including the Nov. 3 Election Day, when we could face another Florida-like constitutional crisis over the vote count.
Meanwhile, malign state actors are meddling with our democracy; the jobless numbers don’t look rosy; more than 200,000 people — many of them people of color and poor — have died from COVID-19 as the president largely ignores the issue and insists an effective vaccine will be available by year’s end, when virus experts say it will be much later in 2021 at the earliest.
Oh, and the flu season is on the way; our citizens in many large cities are protesting police brutality and killings of unarmed black men and women as we endure a long- overdue racial reckoning; the president has said he may not accept the outcome of the Nov. 3 election or guarantee a peaceful transition of power, drawing pushback from powerful GOP senators; and the president may well spring an “October surprise” — but let’s hope it is a Super Bowl prediction and not a missile attack on Tehran without clear evidence the Iranian regime is exceedingly close to building a nuclear weapon.
So, you know, what could go wrong?
On a more pleasant note, while taking a morning walk the other day, I noticed a yard sign that read “Support Unity, Not Division,” which momentarily led me to believe that is the solution to a lot of our problems — local, state and national — and buoyed my hopes that sensible people are not an endangered species and that just about anyone anywhere on the political spectrum could support the idea. Well, as long as there’s a clear understanding that unity is all about democratic principles and steady, enlightened leadership, not unity from someone who fancies himself or herself as an all-powerful autocrat or nationalist saying things like “America first,” as famed aviator and Hitler admirer Charles Lindbergh did at a rally in the late 1930s, before World War II.
On a less pleasant note, those thoughts came after a UCLA survey in June showed a change in American’s attitudes about police after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the nationwide protests that followed.
The outcome of the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey, published in USA Today, found that the number of people with a somewhat favorable or very favorable view of A the police declined across all racial groups over a two-week period, including a drop from 72 percent to 61 percent among whites who responded. Among Blacks who responded, 38 percent they had a somewhat or very favorable view of police, down 9 points from the previous week.
Most Americans do not want to defund the police, polls indicate, but I can understand some who say the police, like schools, are burdened with social and mental health tasks they were never meant to shoulder. We should encourage Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign AB 2054, the CRISES (Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems) Act.
While there are plenty of headlines and evidence that can lead one to believe in racial inequalities in policing, one thing is for sure: We cannot allow some to compare the movement to raise awareness about the issue with the anarchists who have exploited it. Again, unity, not division, and why not cue Canned Heat’s 1970 hit “Let’s Work Together”?
After years of watching our country slowly turn into tribal camps, I am convinced that for things to really change, two things are required: 1) The rich and powerful come to believe and accept the common good as their own: and 2) People other than white men need to be in positions of real political, social, economic and legal power, reflecting our nation’s changing demographics.
I recall covering a naturalization ceremony at the Fairfield Public Library a few years back and came away with the notion that newly minted U.S. citizens see something in the America that we native-born folks do not.
mid this fraught election season, weighed down by a pandemic, are we who we want to be? Is our nation what we want it to be? Or have we lost, in our collective mind’s eye, the dream that inspired the citizen aspirants I encountered before they pledged allegiance to America’s ideals?
We live in a truly remarkable country, yes, in its own way an exceptional one, exemplified, in part, by its court system, flawed as it may be, that I have seen and experienced on my criminal courts beat.
At this time in our nation’s history, as it stumbles and moves toward a more perfect union, I can recall what the newly naturalized U.S. citizens said to me when I asked them how they felt after the ceremony. Separately, each said the same thing: “This is the best day of my life.”